Heroes come in all shapes and sizes--including six-year-old-girl size, as Rad Girls Can: Stories of Bold, Brave, and Brilliant Young Women reminds us.
Writer Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl, who collaborated on Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide: Artists and Athletes, Pirates and Punks, and Other Revolutionaries Who Shaped History, have produced a logical follow-up with Rad Girls Can. Schatz supplies profiles of 50 or so girls from around the globe who, alone or in groups, did truly great things before they hit age 20. Anchoring the book's well-chosen subjects are historical figures--Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges--but there's no shortage of alive-and-kicking young upstarts, among them Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, feminist fashion writer Tavi Gevinson and transgender rights activist Janet Mock. Some profiles read like tales of suspense; when the featured girls (ballet dancer Misty Copeland, novelist S.E. Hinton) persevered despite a lack of parental support, their stories are heartbreakers. Stahl's customary blunt, black-and-white cut-paper art suggests how these young artists, athletes, innovators and activists will look when statues are erected in their likenesses.
Rad Girls Can's back matter includes a spread meant to spur the reader to action ("Start a blog! Make a zine! Write an essay, a slam poem, a song!") and a compendium of thumbnail biographies of bubbling-under contenders for the book's main text. A fine, fitting touch: on a page headlined "YOU!," readers are encouraged to fill in biographical information about their own accomplishments--present and/or future. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author