Title: Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World
Author: Pénélope Bagieu
Rating: ★★★★★
Summary: Throughout history and across the globe, one characteristic connects the daring women of Brazen: their indomitable spirit. Against overwhelming adversity, these remarkable women raised their voices and changed history. With her one-of-a-kind wit and dazzling drawings, celebrated graphic novelist Pénélope Bagieu profiles the lives of these feisty female role models sure to inspire the next generation of rebel ladies.
Brazen is Pénélope Bagieu’s attempt to fill in the gaps of more traditional biographical anthologies, and she nails it. The collection features super-cute artwork set against short biographies of a whole host of women across history and professional disciplines and is super inclusive toward race, age, and sexual identity. While Bagieu includes some big names, most of the women are those often skipped over in other biographies—because they don’t have name recognition, lived too recently, or weren’t “flashy” enough. (Boo!) The graphic novel format made learning about these amazing females so easy, and the reading experience became bittersweet once I’d finished the short glimpses into each woman’s life. After reading Brazen, I am all about learning history through comics, and I wish more authors would follow Bagieu’s lead. She is definitely an author on which I’ll be keeping an eye.
