Three Cheers for Women!

Starting with Cleopatra and ending with Malala Yousafzai, Marcia Williams takes a chronological sprint through the lives of over 70 inspirational women with their stories and achievements depicted in her characteristic comic-strip style.  This volume of brief biographies, full of facts, dates, quotes and jokes, provides a lively addition to the recent spate of children’s book titles celebrating women’s roles throughout history.

Each double-page spread features a different woman and is cleverly designed to include as much information as possible in small blocks of text whilst the detailed, humorous comic-strip illustrations draw the eye and hold the attention, crammed as they are with action, background detail and light-hearted speech bubbles.  Each central frame is surrounded by snippets of fascinating fact and the recurring characters of a boy, a girl, a mouse and some birds with their own speech bubbles provides extra commentary and unites the whole work.  This style and format ensures accessibility to a wide range of child readers and although each life story is necessarily dealt with fairly briefly there is enough information and detail to spark interest and encourage further investigation.

The range of lives covered is wide and diverse, from many cultures and countries, and for all the familiar figures, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Anne Frank, Joan of Arc, to name a few, there are also less well known lives to discover, from Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmentalist, to Mae C. Jemison, the first African-American woman in space.

In the final pages Marcia Williams squeezes in more paragraphs of information and lists of names so giving the reader an idea of the difficulty of choosing only 70 amazing women.  This is a timely, welcome book that will remind child readers that gender, age, background, culture and country need not be barriers to world changing achievements.