Parents' Guide to The ABCs of Women's History

This inclusive and extensive gallery of groundbreaking, mostly American women and girls celebrates talent, achievement, courage, and innovation. It shows how all these women made a difference and helped change the world. There's lots to learn in The ABCs of Women's History, but many of the people, events, words, and concepts—including free speech, solidarity, paid leave, equal pay, and suffrage—will be unfamiliar to young readers, who will benefit from an adult explaining them. In the main text, many people are named without any mention of what they did. Eight pages of back matter (in much smaller type) identify each woman and her significance, and indicate what's meant by each section heading. For example, "U is for unbought and unbossed" refers to the campaign slogan of Shirley Chisholm, whom the back matter explains was "the first Black woman to seek her party's nomination to run for president of the United States." There is mature content in the back matter that some adults may decide is not age-appropriate for a young picture book audience, including an entry about abortion and the Roe v. Wade rulings.

Unfortunately, the lively rhyming text has distracting inconsistent beats in the lines, and sometimes the words at the end of a line are only approximate rhymes, like "wisdom" and "isn't," "breathe" and "trees," "eat" and "see," "speech" and "please," "laugh" and "craft," "gardens" and "librarians," "kind" and "Steinem." Also, the sheer number of women featured in the 67-page book may be overwhelming for young readers—52 in the main text, another 16 mentioned only in the back matter, plus 22 whose names appear on spreads but there's no information in the book about them. It's a decent primer for women's history, if a bit overstuffed.