Rejected Princesses

Rejected Princesses: Tales of Histories Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics by Jason Porath, 370 pages.

This book, based on the blog of the same name, takes various women (of varying degrees of fame) from history and relays their stories in bite-sized bits with full-color illustrations for each. You can definitely tell from these illustrations that Porath is a former Dreamworks animator, and they add a lot to the book. 

I had actually followed the blog this book is based on for a number of years, and the wealth of stories here is a real treat. I appreciate the great breadth of women represented. There are both fairly famous figures (like Ada Lovelace and Joan of Arc) and plenty of others who I had never heard of before (like Osh-Tisch and Annie Jump Cannon), in addition to mythic characters (like Sita and Xtabay). The entries are both funny and informative, which makes them very light to consume a few at a time.

The other thing that I think is really neat about this book is it's rating system. Each story is given a maturity rating from 1-5, in addition to content warnings in the sidebar for things like violence, self-harm, or rape. This organization system is very solid, and seems to work a lot better than sorting the stories by either time period or region. However, it does mean I would warn against doing what I did and reading the book straight through. The last several entries are extremely dark and fairly graphic, and causes to book to end in an extremely emotionally heavy place, so I would recommend jumping around a little to read those ones non-consecutively. That being said, I would still recommend reading them, along with all the other entries in this book, for some extremely casual non-fiction. 

Fun Fact: If you want to read some of the entries in this book (and also some not in this book), you can check out the author's website at rejectedprincesses.com