Customer Reviews

America's First Ladies

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I read about 5 pages of this book and started to wonder if the author was talking down to me or if I was just going through a highly emotional period in my life. I pressed on until about page 20 when I stopped and looked the book up on Amazon. I then realized the issue, this book is written for young adults. This book came into my house as a bargain table purchase of my wife's that sat around on the shelf for a couple of years. I finally took it down to see what it contained. Once I found out the book was geared to a young adults the rather basic and bland writing style made sense. At the end of the day it made for a book that I got through so fast I could almost delude myself in thinking I had picked up speed reading skills.

I tend to like my non fiction books to follow chronological order and find that if they do not I get disappointed. This book, one that you would think almost demands a historical order, was chopped up into subject specific chapters. One chapter on ball gowns, one on parties etc. I felt that I could not get a good feel for how the position of first lady changed over the years because of the snippets in each chapter made it difficult to see the progressions. I also felt that the author was able to hide content holes by structuring the book in this fashion. She tended to fill the chapters up with a predominate amount of recent or more popular first ladies. It was probably easier to find the material that way.

Overall I was disappointed by the book. This being said I am probably not the right reviewer for the book. I have never read, at least not for 20 some odd years, a book focused on a teenager market thus I was disappointed in its depth. I also have no idea what a teenager would be looking for in a book of this nature so I can only judge the book by my own viewpoint.