Rejected Princesses

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I loved learning about all of the women. I didn't love the author's voice or writing style. I take it more as a (really really long) list of women I would like to read about more in other books.

Something to note, especially for those thinking of reading them to kids—they aren't really written for kids, especially towards the end (home of the more “mature” ((read: brutal)) stories). In fact, one of the challenging things about a lot of them is that while each woman has a remarkable story, they are not all essentially good people. Of course, neither are the male “heroes” we often read about. There is just a lot of grey area, which didn't leave me feeling inspired, just torn. Plus, a lot of the truth behind the stories is clouded by history and biased people.

Overall, not sure I would recommend it. Maybe to a person looking for something particular.

Before we had drunk history, we had rejected princesses on Tumblr!

That's basically how I feel about this. It starts out saying that people may not finish this book because they will read some inaccuracy or something that they don't understand and decide the rest of the book is full of inaccuracies also (which sounds strange because... is history not ever changing?). But the book also paints half of the tales and folklore and myths as fact and doesn't explicitly tell you every time that they might be propaganda or myths or legends until after the fact. Some of them are very clearly folk stories and other ones are pieced together from legend and fact but never is it clearly delineated which is which in every story. Some get graphic and some are very realistic and others are like children stories. Thankfully there is a legend that explains which are kid-friendly and which aren't, but honestly, it's a book about women's history, it's not all roses ever. I think ordering the stories for children and the ones that include mature events separately would have made for better reading to kids instead of skipping around the book. Instead everything is shuffled together and leads to a very odd rollercoaster of emotions as a reader. It doesn't feel well researched when everything is cobbled together in that sense, even though the bibliography and acknowledgments seem VERY thorough.

Anyway. I'm glad this this exists and that I own this, and have read it, finally. I just had issues with the presentation.

Also every trigger warning is needed.