Written By: Brandon Marie Miller
Publisher: Chicago Review Press (February 1, 2016)
I borrowed this from the Chicago public library to review as this is a Cybils nominee
My first thought is to pair this with Sign of the Beaver in my Colonial Days booklist. I like that right at the start the author addresses the language of the time and explains that there were no common standards for spelling and punctuation which were something I hadn’t thought about.
Words like victuals, wherefore, and the phrase, “strange opinions” that women would have. I believe that it’s important for kids today to read the words that were once used within the telling of the histories. None of this happened that long ago in the sense of the entire timeline of history, yet within the last 300 years, life is almost entirely different for women.
The book contains the accounts of thirteen women who lived from 1600 – 1750. All are from different socioeconomic levels, and they are both famous and mostly forgotten stories. Pocahontas and Anne Hutchinson were most familiar to me. Mary Rowlandson was unfamiliar, but her story of Indian captivity was riveting.
Overall the chapters read like short stories that are self-contained, and so this lends itself to being the kind of book that can be stretched out and read aloud or can be read by an older student all at once. My kids love listening to books and we often have one book that I read during lunch time at the table. This is one of those books.
We just happen to be in this section of history, so I’m going to renew it and start reading it now. If we weren’t, then I would buy it.