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  • Adventurous Women: Eight True Stories about Women Who Made a Difference
  • Elizabeth Bush
Colman, Penny Adventurous Women: Eight True Stories about Women Who Made a Difference. Holt, 2006 [224p] illus. with photographs ISBN 0-8050-7744-8$17.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 4-8

Colman offers eight essays, in no particular order, about American women from the [End Page 346] nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who tend to be overlooked in children's books about women ahead of their time. Several subjects are, indeed, hardly household names, such as Juana Briones, who freed herself from a no-good husband in colonial California and managed a profitable rancho on her own; Mary Gibson Henry, who traveled Canada and Alaska on horseback or in a customized car to search for exotic plants for private and museum collections; and Biddy Mason, a freed slave who served early Los Angelenos as midwife and healer. Arctic explorer and researcher Louise Boyd, industrial poisons expert Alice Hamilton, civil rights activist Mary Bethune, Union hospital-ship nurse Katherine Wormley, and first accredited female wartime reporter Peggy Hull are, perhaps, better known, but they are engagingly representative of a wide range of groundbreaking experiences. However eventful their lives, though, they don't shine to full advantage here. Narration is generally flat, even creaky: "Boyd and her staff of scientists visited many fiords and bays and islands where they stopped and went ashore to take pictures and gather information about the geology and plants and birds and animals"; "Crossing deep, fast-flowing rivers was a source of thrills, too." Moreover, the essay format provides less the "freedom and flexibility" Colman offers as a rationale for the approach than a sometimes startlingly uneven tone. Black-and-white photos appear sporadically; there's a wealth of end matter, including chronologies, places to visit, namesakes, quote sources, bibliographies, and an index, that can serve as springboards to further investigation.

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