From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8–A dozen determined women star in accounts that reveal the hardships and obstacles they persistently overcame to reach their goals. Mountain climber Annie Smith Peck spent several years and made many attempts before becoming the first woman to summit Peru's Mount Huascarán. She continued to climb mountains into her 80s. In 1988, Australian Kay Cottee became the first woman to complete a solo, nonstop voyage around the world in a 37-foot-long sloop. Others such as American Josephine Peary, Hungarian Florence Baker, and French spelunker Elisabeth Casteret, accompanied their husbands into wild and dangerous territories. Simple cartoon-style drawings at the beginning of each tale and some full-page scenes provide respite from uninterrupted pages of text, although they sometimes belie the life-threatening situations recounted here. Only a few of these women are included in similar compilations. Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen's generously illustrated
Women of Discovery (Crown, 2001) and Michele B. Slung's
Living with Cannibals and Other Women's Adventures (National Geographic, 2000) both present their subjects' tales in a straightforward manner while Atkins creates a realistic narrative complete with conversational exchanges. The bibliography lists primary sources for all but Jeanne Baret and Arnarulunguaq, but it is still likely that many of the conversations are surmised rather than exact. A compilation such as this one is certainly welcome to help complete the picture of human discovery that truly depended on the efforts of both men and women.
–Ann G. Brouse, Steele Memorial Library, Elmira, NY Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Gr. 5-8. Atkins (
Wings and Rockets, 2002) offers another collective biography, this one about women explorers, beginning with Jeanne Baret, an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who, disguised as a boy, became the first woman to sail around the world. Other chapters feature women who explored caves, mountain peaks, the Sahara, and the Nile; the final chapter profiles contemporary Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. Although classified as nonfiction and framed on facts, the stories, illustrated with Petricic's winsome pen-and-ink drawings, are greatly fictionalized, including long stretches of imagined conversation, feelings, thoughts, and scenarios. A bibliography is appended, but there are no notes to help readers distinguish fact from fiction. Given the current debate about clear source notes, Atkins' approach raises plenty of questions, and teachers and librarians may want to caution against using the title for reports. The strongest justifications for purchase are the thrilling adventures and the introductions to daring, accomplished, and, in some cases, nearly forgotten women who changed history. Readers may want to follow this with more thoroughly documented volumes about these groundbreaking explorers.
Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
