So far as Cat's Eye goes, it has real characters, but she just seems like a pretty horrible person in the end. And I don't mean her treatment of her "friend" - because that can still be viewed as the teenage responses to ongoing relational issues between the two of them. I mean her relationship with her husband and her children - even her adult life kind of sucks and she's still not that great of an individual. This doesn't make it an awful book, in fact it makes it a really interesting character study and fascinating to discuss, but I don't know that it's a good one if you're trying to go for strong female role models and self-sufficiency.