Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World
By: Mackenzi Lee / Narrated By: Lucy James
Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
Itty bitty snippets/bios of a gazillion and six women who rocked
All right, so maybe not a gazillion and six, maybe fifty-two…
Bygone Badass Broads was my mom’s pick for our audiobook club, which was quite apropos as my mom has been a badass broad from the get-go, whether she was splaying herself around drum sets to tap out rhythms at a party as a very young girl, or whether she was getting into Transcendental Meditation back when it was a groovy new thing, not for the masses, to do. So we were all excited to be doing this audiobook, and we were all woefully disappointed. Uhm, here’s why…
It’s cuz this, see: Mackenzi Lee is obviously a very young and social media-savvy woman who caters to those with itty bitty attention spans. This book comes from her series of TWEETS, for crying out loud, about nifty and audacious women. I applaud that she’s bringing the histories of such bold women to the modern generation, but man! Talk about snippets! Each “bio” is, like, three seconds long.
Okay, okay. So maybe a bit longer than that, but not by much. I’m not even going to name any that you’ll be hearing about because, really, they fly by so very swiftly. Just suffice it to know that all manner of women are covered and, this I WILL say of Lee, she is extremely inclusive. Black women! Native American! Straight and gay! Ancient and all through the more modern historical eras! All politics! You name it, there’s a woman here who has rocked.
So, while we were disappointed that we didn’t get a very good sense of any of the women, at least it gave us a point of discussion, and a point to start with. And I was very pleased that I was actually able to hold my own in texted conversation about a few of the women in that they’ve been known to me given prior reviews… where I was given more about them than the oh so basic that is covered in these Tweeted bios.
There’s Hatshepsut from When Women Ruled the World. And a favorite of mine, the Mirabal sisters who were wonderfully written about in Julia Alvarez’s book In the Time of the Butterflies.
So you see, while Bygone Badass Broads is rather lacking as a book for enlightenment, it does succeed as a place where snippets come together to tantalize the reader/listener.
Speaking of listening, now I’ve gotta come to the narration of Lucy James. Oy vey… The woman comes off as an excitable Valley Girl (And younger women are probably wondering: What the heck is a Valley Girl?!?) with all sorts of inflections and exclamation points and suppressed giggles. Which is a trifle annoying if you’re, say, my age, crotchety ancient, and not given to excitement. But the worst? When James comes to the foreign names? Oh. My. GOD! Ice pick to the ear! She absolutely BUTCHERS it all, especially the Latina names. We all had to hit the chapter titles to get the real names cuz what James made them sound like was soooo…. off…!
ANYway! This is a good enough little audiobook to get you started, just don’t expect depth of ANY kind, and do expect mispronunciations.
And really? Women rock, so ya miiiight wanna take a few of these names and hit Wikipedia. Now THAT’S AWEsome!
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