'The feminist bedtime story book you'll wish you had growing up' – Stylist What if the princess didn't marry Prince Charming but instead went on to be an astronaut? What if the jealous step sisters were supportive and kind? And what if the queen was the one really in charge of the kingdom? Illustrated by sixty female artists from every corner of the globe, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls introduces us to one hundred remarkable women and their extraordinary lives, from Ada Lovelace to Malala, Elizabeth I to Serena Williams. Empowering, moving and inspirational, these are true fairy tales for heroines who definitely don't need rescuing. -Synopsis, Angus and Robertson So I just came across a Facebook ad for a published collection of stories about women who excelled after overcoming obstacles. Even though I had issues with the ad itself, I decided to check it out and came across snippets of the book like the one above. Although many of the stories I looked at were interesting, sometimes it seemed they tended to gloss of the actual achievements and struggles of these women and talk a lot about random interesting facts about these women. The story I had chosen to display, in particular, was a more extreme example of this. Out of the whole page, only a few sentences mentioned her occupation as a doctor. The rest of the page detailed how she was looked upon for wearing mens clothing. It would have been more interesting to concentrate on her medical work. That being said, the authors have done marvelous work providing easy access of the lives of 100 women to young children, which is potentially 100 more than they would have had, without this book. Having one page of text per woman would understandably make each biography not as detailed as preferred, and having the target audience as young children also requires the information to be simplistic. It's pretty amazing as an introduction to cool women in history, and I definitely agree I wish I had this book growing up. I intend to buy a copy for a few of my younger relatives and myself. I would really like to see another book like this targeted for older kids, with maybe 2-3 pages of text for each woman.
