I had the opportunity to read and review this book, to be published in October, via NetGalley. Here is my review.
There are many positives to this book. I learnt about women I had never heard of, and a few faceless known names were given form by record of their achievements. I am not sure exactly the target audience the author was seeking, but it seems a bit muddled. A white male like myself would seem, for a change, not to be it. There were many references throughout the book to “us ladies” sticking together, to paraphrase, and the book seemed to be trying to skew fairly young by removing the G from the ends of words and other youth-orientated contractions. This was a little off-putting but not necessarily bad, I suppose. Just something that may need clarifying, along with the capitalisation of the B in “Black” when referring to race. Why?
Otherwise I enjoyed reading the book. There was a wealth of information about the backgrounds of many of the women featured – again, I would’ve preferred a focus on the invention/achievement of the individuals, but this is not an academic text. It was accessible, I found, with the frustration being that, especially for the women further back in history, there is so little confirmed information. This leads to “maybe” and “perhaps” in place of verified information, but this is not the author’s fault. Clearly a lot of research was done in the writing of this book, and various people are thanked in the acknowledgements for help with this.