Consider this short book review:
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls
Reviewed by Nicola Prentis
https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/study-break/graded-reading/good-night-stories-rebel-girls-book-review-level-1
We all know how fairy tales go. A beautiful girl waits for a prince to find her. Then she gets married to him and becomes a princess. But what if the girl was clever or strong instead of beautiful? What if she wanted to be an astronaut, a politician or a pirate instead of a princess? And what if she didn’t need a prince to do it? That’s the idea behind the book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. It’s a book of fairy tales with a difference: all the stories are true.
The book tells the stories of one hundred amazing women from 1500 BC to today. But, the stories aren’t just boring biographies. Instead, they’re like fairy tales. You probably won’t know the names of most of the women but, when you finish reading, you’ll ask yourself why. Sometimes, it’s because people tried to remove them from history. Like Hatshepsut, one of the most important queens of Egypt. After she died, some men broke her statues and removed her name from documents. Other times, it’s because a man’s name became more famous. For example, Charles Babbage is called the ‘father of computers’ but a woman, Ada Lovelace, wrote the first computer program.
Why haven’t we learned about these women before? Often history remembers men more than women. If you close your eyes and think of a war hero and a pilot, you probably think of men. If you read the book, those pictures might start to become women of all colours and ages. The women in the book did things because they wanted to and they didn’t listen when people told them not to.