Like its companion volume, Boys Who Rocked the World, this collective biography offers engaging profiles of women who achieved great success at a young age.
It’s unusual to find Joan of Arc, the Brontë sisters, Harriet Tubman, Coco Chanel, Rigoberta Menchu, Wilma Rudolph, and Natalie Portman in the same company. What they have in common is that they made their marks on the world before the age of 20. In an appealing, conversational style, McCann presents short biographies of young women from all over the world, from ancient to contemporary, who prove that youth need not prevent one making a difference. Familiar names such as Sacagawea, Helen Keller, S.E. Hinton and Mother Teresa share the pages with Laura Bassi (an 18th-century Italian physicist), Queen Salote Tupou III (mid-20th-century queen of Tonga), the Night Witches (Russian fighter pilots during World War II) and Adriana Ocampo (a planetary geologist from Argentina now living in the United States). Intertwined with the profiles are comments from teenage girls expressing intentions to rock the world.
An inspiring, empowering compendium. (bibliography, websites, endnotes) (Nonfiction. 11 & up)
