Rating: WARTY!
This is a short book padded by large font, spaced text and some okay illustrations by Rebecca Guay. It purports to tell us about bad girls in history - bad for one reason or another, such as spying, betrayal thievery, murder, and so on. I am not sure who it's aimed at; it seems a bit mature for middle grade and a bit simplistic for young adult or older. It's also highly biased towards bad girls in the USA: fifteen out of the twenty-six women reported on. The US is only five percent of the world's population, yet 60% of these stories are US women! Does the US really sport more bad girls than the other seven billion population put together?! I doubt it.
There's also a huge lack of ethnic/racial diversity. Here's the list of suspects:
- Delilah
- Jezebel
- Cleopatra
- Salome
- Anne Boleyn
- Bloody Mary
- Elizabeth Báthory
- Moll Cutpurse
- Tituba
- Anne Bonney and Mary Read
- Peggy Shippen Arnold
- Catherine the Great
- Rose O'Neal Greenhow
- Belle Starr
- Calamity Jane
- Lizzie Borden
- Madame Alexe Popova
- Pearl Hart
- Typhoid Mary
- Mata Hari
- Ma Barker
- Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner
- Bonnie Parker
- Virginia Hill
Each two- or three-page potted bio is followed by a single comic book page depicting Yolen and her daughter discussing the merits of whether she was a bad girl or just misunderstood or whatever. Those pages contributed nothing save to show what an easy life these two authors truly have if the comic pages are representative of any of their days: trying on shoes, going to a day spa, sitting around drinking a beverage and relaxing. The mini bios tell very little, and since a lot of the "research' comes directly from Wikipedia, you may as well read the Wikipedia page and get more out of it. I was surprised, given all the time these two evidently have on their hands, that they couldn't have put more effort into this.
The only reason I read it was that I thought it might be fun and maybe give me an idea or two for a novel, but I already wrote the Cleopatra one (my middle-grade targeted Cleoprankster) and there really wasn't much meat in the text here to give me something to bite. I can't recommend this/.
