Nobody Ever Asked Me about the Girls

This was disappointing. The author's decision to break up her chapters by themes means she provides little snippets of information about a lot of female musicians but not very much depth about any one of them. Yeah, we get it - being a woman in a male-dominated music world is hard. Appearance is overly emphasized. There's a double standard about sex for men and women. It's hard to maintain a relationship when you're a famous musician, and it's hard to stay popular when you're an aging female musician. Tell me something I don't know.

Robinson also seems to have a personal grudge against Madonna and Taylor Swift, viewing both of them as fame-hungry hacks without any real talent. She's allowed to have her opinions, I guess, but a) I don't agree with her and b) she's unnecessarily cruel and dismissive of two women who, for better or worse, have both changed the landscape of popular music.

There are a few musicians who get a slightly deeper focus than the others, including Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell and Sheryl Crow. I wish Robinson had written a book that examined the lives and musical histories of these three greats instead of this scattershot hodgepodge that only skims the surface. I understand that Robinson's late husband digitized thousands of hours of interviews that she used for the book, and in some ways the book feels like a tribute to his work, but she could have made the book much stronger with some judicial editing.