The Brassy Female Character: Peck's Blossom Culp as a Standard Current Writers Should Aim For

One of the more annoying things about trends is that readers/viewers/critics tend to behave as if nothing has ever happened before, such as--

Behaving as if no writer before 2020 wrote strong female characters.

Peck's Blossom Culp proves that assumption utterly wrong (so does Shakespeare, but Shakespeare comes with more baggage). 

Blossom Culp is a fantastic female character in four of Peck's books. Though she appears in an earlier book, the first book primarily about Blossom is Ghosts I Have Been, whose plot has a link to the Titanic! She is exceedingly proactive--she scares boys to stop them tipping over a privy. She defends another girl on the playground. She helps her mentor, Miss Dabney, to out-maneuver a shyster spiritualist. She gains the ability to see ghosts and ends up traveling to England where she poses in Madam Tussauds.

So Blossom Culp is a great character but she does interesting things. She is also great because she has personality.  

In comparison, the scriptwriters of The War of the Rohirrim apparently consider their main female character to be preferable to all other LOTR female characters because she is "complex." I guess "complex" means "does a lot of things with confidence after a brief pause." 

But in truth, the main female character of The War of the Rohirrim is boring. 

Blossom is not boring. Like Agatha Christie's nurse in Murder in Mesopotamia, she is observant and somewhat blunt. Christie's nurse is more tactful. But both characters have a brassy good-nature that precludes cynicism (cynical narrators can be enticing--they can also get a bit wearisome like the Genie constantly breaking the fourth wall). They are intelligent about human nature  at a practical everyday level. 

Blossom Culp is younger than Christie's nurse, of course, being about twelve in the first book. She is also adventurous, tough, smart and clever (the two traits are not synonymous) and human. She is kind. She isn't perfect. She has her weaknesses, one of them being the next-door neighbor boy, Alexander. Consequently, she is well-rounded, especially since she has a sense of humor with a pragmatic view of life:

"I was never threatened with imprisonment after the first hour or so." 

"I could have done better, and I might have done worse. But that's true of life in general."