The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont

Posted March 2, 2018 by Amber in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont

eBook

Published by Random House on March 6th 2018
Length: 208 pages Source: NetGalley

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two-stars

This inspiring, beautifully illustrated collection honors one hundred exceptional women throughout history and around the world.

A Stylist Must-read Book of 2018

In this luminous volume, New York Times bestselling writer Julia Pierpont and artist Manjit Thapp match short, vibrant, and surprising biographies with stunning full-color portraits of secular female "saints" champions of strength and progress. These women broke ground, broke ceilings, and broke molds--including

Maya Angelou - Jane Austen - Ruby Bridges - Rachel Carson - Shirley Chisholm - Marie Curie & Irene Joliot Curie - Isadora Duncan - Amelia Earhart - Artemisia Gentileschi - Grace Hopper - Dolores Huerta - Frida Kahlo - Billie Jean King - Audre Lorde - Wilma Mankiller - Toni Morrison - Michelle Obama - Sandra Day O'Connor - Sally Ride - Eleanor Roosevelt - Margaret Sanger - Sappho - Nina Simone - Gloria Steinem - Kanno Sugako - Harriet Tubman - Mae West - Virginia Woolf - Malala Yousafzai

Open to any page and find daily inspiration and lasting delight.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley and Random House in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I think this book could be good or incredibly disappointing, depending up what you’re looking to get out of it. Speaking for myself, I wanted another Rejected Princesses. I wanted a book with the stories of powerful women and all their contributions. That is not quite what I got, so I was understandably disappointed.

Here is where The Little Book of Feminist Saints excels:

It highlights 100+ women from different time periods and different walks of life and the contributions they have made.
It’s light and easy reading.
It’s illustrated, which is always fun.

Here is where it fell short for me:

The entries are organized by “feast day”, so you’re jumping all over the globe and across time to very different women who have done very different things. The flow is really broken in that way.
Some of the entries are well done, but others are less focused on the women in question and more focused on an event surrounding them. Personally, I’d’ve preferred information on the women.
In entries where more than one woman was represented, the blurb tended to focus on one or the other.
In Josephine Baker’s entry, an anonymous YouTube comment is quoted? That really bugged me.

Overall, I don’t feel like I really learned anything from this book and ended up skimming a lot, trying to find portions that talked about the women themselves instead of random things (Anne Frank’s entry was largely about a tree). I believe The Little Book of Feminist Saints would serve well as a pocket guide or daily calendar, but doesn’t really suit this book format. It could be used as a launching board to find incredible women, then research and learn about them elsewhere.