When Favilli and Cavallo's Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls first became a hit a couple of years ago, I thought the idea very endearing, and made a note to check them out properly after flipping through one in a book shop. When this new installment in the series, focused on immigrant women past and present, became available as an instant download, I jumped at the opportunity.
This is the first book that Cavallo did not contribute to, it is solely Favilli's work. The one hundred women included all left their countries of birth for different reasons—some to seek new opportunities, some out of necessity, some moved more than once. The women included were diverse in every sense of the word: From all over the world, and with all sorts of backgrounds and occupations, ranging from scientists, to athletes (a bit too many for my taste), businesswomen, politicians, artists, and activists.
Of the one hundred women included, I was familiar with about a dozen. I didn't keep count, but I'd say that most were contemporary women still alive and active today, and only a small fraction historical figures—I suppose the women who paved the way in more significant ways (I'm thinking of real watershed moments; big scientific discoveries, the suffrage, Civil Rights Movement, etc.) have already been included in the previous volumes, or didn't fit what this volume sets out to do, which is to teach children that people have worth and potential to achieve great things no matter where they came from, their funny accent, imperfect speech, or the color of their skin. In any case, I find the "...who changed the world" in the title a bit of a hyperbole.
Being Good Night stories, all the chapters begin with a "Once Upon a Time..." or "Once there was a girl...", and the text is very simplified, and meant to be appropriate and inspirational for young children. Concepts that would likely be new to a child, and may put a parent in a difficult position when asked to explain, such as "racism", "discrimination", "segregation", "refugee", "prejudice", "undocumented", or "holocaust", have footnotes and are succinctly defined in a glossary. I somehow can't see a child who'd enjoy a book like this be satisfied with those short explanations, but they might be good gateways for more in-depth, educational conversations. The hard topics covered however definitely didn't jibe with the easy texts, and I feel that a child mature enough to engage with these mature topics would have a higher reading level and find these vignettes too simplified and thus unsatisfying or not engaging and interesting enough.
It's a cute book, but I was most certainly not the target audience, and before buying this one, I'd probably look at the earlier volumes covering less obscure women—unless, of course, this is specifically a gift for an immigrant child who'd be inspired by these particular stories.
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Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review, but it did not include the illustrations, which are a big part of this series. The digital copy I accessed was also poorly formatted, with the quotes from the end of a chapter blending into the title and first paragraph of the next, making it hard or impossible to read. These issues did not have a big impact on my rating, only on my enjoyment.