Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls 2

Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls 2 by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo is a book of true bedtime stories for 7 year olds, a hundred of them, one page each.

What happens

Every woman gets a single page and a picture by a different artist each time. Most pages close with something she actually said.

They start "Once upon a time", which is a bit of a trick, because none of it is made up.

Agatha Christie talked about wanting to be a writer with her dog, George Washington, on their daily walks. She looked at every new place as a setting and wondered whether the people she met might do as characters. Then the rejection letters piled up, so she wrote a detective novel instead.

Aisholpan Nurgaiv was thirteen and lived in the Altai Mountains, where for seven generations the men had hunted with golden eagles. She asked her father to teach her. "I know that no girls have ever done this," she said, "but if you teach me, I'll be good."

Alice Ball worked out how to turn an oil from the chaulmoogra tree into a treatment for leprosy. She died before she could publish it, and the university took the credit and named the method after its own dean.

Each one takes about two minutes to read aloud, which is exactly right for the end of a bedtime when everybody's tired. The order is alphabetical by first name, so there's nothing to follow and no reason not to flick.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that real lives come with real horrors in them, and a few of these pages go somewhere you'd want to be ready for. Andrée Peel runs a beauty parlour, joins the French Resistance, and ends up starving in a concentration camp, lined up in front of a firing squad when the Allies arrive. Alice Ball's page needs you to explain what leprosy does. Boudicca and Anne Bonny are here too, and they weren't gentle women.

None of it is gruesome and none of it is drawn out. It's two or three plain sentences and then the page moves on. But at seven your reader will probably stop you and ask, so it's the sort of book you want to be reading with them rather than handing over at bedtime.

The flip side is that these are the best conversations. A girl who's just been told she can't do something will find plenty of women in here who were told exactly the same.

What to read next

When one of the hundred grabs them and a page clearly isn't enough, Who Was Ida B Wells? gives a whole book to one of them, a girl born into slavery in Mississippi who taught herself on newspapers her father asked her to read aloud.