Julia Pierpont starts off The Little Book of Feminist Saints with a story in her prologue about playing Peter Pan as a young girl. Immediately I knew I was going to enjoy reading little stories about the women she included in the book because of that story – I always played Peter Pan. Always.

Each of the women included are given their own day, just as Saints are, and the information on each page includes unique and inspirational information. The women included are a fairly diverse bunch and I enjoyed learning more about each of them. It is the perfect gift book for your favorite women! ( )

A wonderful little book full of inspiring women's stories that more people should talk about and learn in schools. ( )

This book takes the stories of 100 mould-breaking women from around the world and throughout history and puts their stories together into a book formatted along the lines of a traditional Catholic saints book. Each woman profiled is given a designation of which she is a matron saint and a feast day chosen based on a significant date in her life. There are actors, artists, activists, poets, mountain climbers, pilots, scientists and more. Each “saint” is illustrated by Manjit Thapp in lovely full-page illustrations that capture the essence of the person.

The aim is not to present the women’s full life story but to highlight key moments or anecdotes that give the reader an idea of who she is and why she is important to know about. The book can be flipped through or read straight through (I did the latter) and would make a good companion piece to Pénélope Bagieu’s Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rock the World. There is some overlap of content between the two books, but there are enough differences in presentation and approach that they work well together. ( )

I think this book could be good or incredibly disappointing, depending up what you're looking to get out of it. Speaking for myself, I wanted another Rejected Princesses. I wanted a book with the stories of powerful women and all their contributions. That is not quite what I got, so I was understandably disappointed.

Here is where The Little Book of Feminist Saints excels:

- It highlights 100+ women from different time periods and different walks of life and the contributions they have made.
- It's light and easy reading.
- It's illustrated, which is always fun.

Here is where it fell short for me:
- The entries are organized by "feast day", so you're jumping all over the globe and across time to very different women who have done very different things. The flow is really broken in that way.
- Some of the entries are well done, but others are less focused on the women in question and more focused on an event surrounding them. Personally, I'd've preferred information on the women.
- In entries where more than one woman was represented, the blurb tended to focus on one or the other.
- In Josephine Baker's entry, an anonymous YouTube comment is quoted? That really bugged me.

Overall, I don't feel like I really learned anything from this book and ended up skimming a lot, trying to find portions that talked about the women themselves instead of random things (Anne Frank's entry was largely about a tree). I believe The Little Book of Feminist Saints would serve well as a pocket guide or daily calendar, but doesn't really suit this book format. It could be used as a launching board to find incredible women, then research and learn about them elsewhere. ( )