Title: Ten Girls Who Made History
Author: Irene Howat
Major Themes: Bessie Adams, Betty Green, Elisabeth Elliot, Emma Dryer, Florence Nightingale, Henrietta Mears, Ida Scudder, Jeanette Li, Lottie Moon, Mary Jane Kinnaird
Synopsis: Short biographies of ten famous women who changed the world for Christ are followed by passages that help readers apply lessons to their own lives.
I’m not a very big fan, usually, of books that offer short introductions to a lot of different people. I prefer to read a full-length biography. These Lightkeepers books are pretty good, though. Each one has a short chapter about a few incidents in the life of a famous person, with some things to think about afterward. I found the short stories in Ten Girls Who Made History to be quite interesting.
Quite a range of people are introduced in this book. You’ll learn about people who are very famous, such as Florence Nightingale and Ida Scudder, as well as people I had never heard of, such as Henrietta Mears and Emma Dryer. In fact, fully half of these women were new to me! That, I appreciated.
After the story about each of the women, there are two more pages. There is a fact file, giving more information about a historical event or something else connected to the person’s life. The Keynote gives a lesson you can learn from their life, and the Think section enlarges on that. Last, there is a prayer for the reader to pray, incorporating something from the woman’s life.
I would say that this book would be good for a family devotional, maybe at the beginning of the school day. We haven’t used any of them for that purpose, because we have always had other books I wanted to read, but maybe sometime we will.
Listening Level—Ages 5 – 8, 8 – 12, Family Friendly
Reading Independently—Ages 8 – 12