This book was absolutely phenomenal. I love books that bright light to the women who have impacted history, because they are so often left out of history books. Women have always been active participants and change makers in our world, but their contributions have often been actively overlooked, erased, or ignored. Books like Girl Squads show us that all we have to do to discover the amazing women changing the world is to look.

Girl Squads tells the stories of twenty groups of women from ancient times up to modern day whose friendships and contributions have profoundly impacted their community, culture, or the world. From female athletes paving the way for future generations and artists breaking barriers to politicians fighting for equality and scientists making incredible breakthroughs. Of all the incredible groups of women in this book, there were only a few I was familiar with beforehand. But each and every one of them led fascinating and incredible lives that deserve to be told. I'm so glad that Sam Maggs is telling their stories.

In addition to telling the stories of these important women, and celebrating the incredible power of female friendship, this book is also just so much dang fun. Sam Maggs' writing style is casual and conversational, often breaking into asides and peppering in slang in a way that really brings the stories to life. I loved that this book could make me laugh even while recounting some tough women facing tough times. This is the kind of feminist book I want-- not glossing over the realities of the past, the sexism or the racism, while still feeling like a celebration of women working together to make change happen in the past and in the present.

Highly, highly recommend for anyone who feels female friendships deserve better representation in the media, wants to read more fun, feminist nonfiction, or just feels like reading a really great book about some incredible women.

Loved this and the variety of "girl squads". Might take the kindle over to my nieces and read a few pieces to them!

Not my personal favorite of Sam’s books but still great. Especially loved the arts and science squads!

A good introduction to some amazing women and their contributions to women's equality, specifically for a younger audience. Although the writing is witty at times, sometimes it's just a little annoying. However, that being said, the mini bios included in this collection are stories that should be shared. A good start for anyone wanting to read more detailed biographies of these women. The women portrayed are from different cultures, locations, and eras, so kudos for that. I was especially moved by the Afghan music one.

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As a mother of two young daughters, I want them to feel confident, capable, and powerful as they grow up. Strong female role models are important for them to look up to, both in their social circles and in the world around them. Not only is it positive for them to have individuals to admire, they also should witness strong female friendships.

Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships That Changed History by Sam Maggs is a new book aimed at highlighting how women can band together and support each other in their joint accomplishments. Each chapter has a specific focus, with several "girl squads" highlighted within those categories. Each of the stories has an illustration to accompany it.

The author shares stories of friendships of female athletes, warriors, scientists, artists, and activists from around the world.

The accounts are thorough, supported by many factual details. I suspect the audience is geared towards upper high-school or college students. While the accounts can be empowering, my one hang-up is how "chatty" and casual the language is. It's as if it's a pep rally for sisterhood. While I can get behind the importance of encouraging each other, not all will be interested in the language; "and, like, ..." is typical, as well as descriptions of "dang," "bad-ass," and "kick-ass" throughout.

If you aren't looking for high-brow literature and think you or another in your life will embrace the conversational language, these stories will be perfect. Some will be familiar, like the female SCOTUS judges or the black women mathematicians at NASA highlighted in the book/movie Hidden Figures, bu there are numerous stories of women previously unknown to me.

(I received a digital ARC from NetGalley and Quirk Books in exchange for my honest review.)

I have had the opportunity to meet and see Sam Maggs speak a few times, and have loved her books in the past! Sam truly is the epitome of a cool, feminist, nerd! She speaks inclusively and her books are validating and empowering and Girl Squads was no exception! This book focused on exactly how much is possible, when women come together to accomplish something! And it really showed how powerful we can be when women support women. Not to mention, the illustrations were totally adorable. I will surely be adding this intersectional collection to my shelves and would highly suggest it to anyone looking to learn a little bit about feminism and girl friendships.

I loved this book! The full review will be posted soon at kaitgoodwin.com/books! Thank you very much for this wonderful opportunity to connect books to their readers!

I really enjoyed this collection featuring amazing girl squads from across the world and from many different time periods. The authors were a little sassy and were throwing some shade and I was total into it. Several of the girl squads I had heard of and I enjoyed getting to know a little more or getting to hear about them in a different light, but overall I hadn't even heard of most of the women discussed in this book.

I think this book will make a great holiday present for all the strong women in your life and I can't wait to see the finished copy (the illustrations are super cool too).

Thanks Netgalley and Quirk Books for my review copy!

There have been quite a few titles published in the last few years that give short essays on women (and their accomplishments) that history seems to have forgotten. Girl Squads is the first one I've seen about women supporting women and the accomplishments that were made as a result of that support. The short entries span recorded history and are divided into sections devoted to the arts, science, sports, politics/activism, and warriors. The squads discussed in each section were a mix of known and unknown, and all were fascinating. The title is well-written and the short essays are very readable. I highly recommend it.

There have been a lot of women/girls biography books come out in the past few years and I have read most of them, but this book brings something new to the genre for a few reasons.
1. It focuses on groups of women. Women are so often pitted against each other but this book shows how friendships made these women great.
2. The stories are longer. Instead of just short intros into a person, these stories are much longer, which means that you can get into more of their lives and who they really are.

Overall I really enjoyed reading this book and I think that it will be a great book especially for tween and teens, but even I learned a lot about women that I had never heard of before.

The term, "squad", in relation to friendships, was extremely overused a few years ago, but the theory behind it is empowering. Pitting women against each other is a favorite past time of mainstream media, but there are several stories of women banning together and making an impact on history.

In "Girl Squads", author Sam Maggs tells 20 brief stories about about women working together and making a better life for themselves and the women that come after them. Some of the stories are well known, most recently with the African-American women of NASA who calculated the numbers to send the first man to the moon to the story behind the 3 women who currently sit on the Supreme Court. But have you heard the story of the Edinburgh Seven, who were the first women accepted into medical school in the United Kingdom? The Patriotic Women's League of Iran, which was composed of Persian women who fought for equal rights? Or the work a group of women did in Antarctica?

The stories are short and concise, but with some more research, any of these stories could be a full fledged book just asking for a movie adaptation. This was a fun, interesting history read and you will walk away continuing to be in awe of women and their accomplishments.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a review.

Sam Maggs writes great books about women in history, and Girl Squads continues that greatness as she writes about teams of women who have worked together to make history.

Representing a great range of people from the skiing sisters, Shirley and Sharon Frith to the Patriotic Women’s League Of Iran to The Red Lanterns Shining in China, this book covers a variety of squads that worked together to create and do things and does it well. With funny moments and poignant thoughts this book delivers some incredible stories about incredible people.

This book has a great layout with different sections for different areas and if the cover is anything to go by the illustrations to come to go with these chapters are going to look incredible. The stories are told beautifully and cover everything you would need to know - and makes you want to know so much more about these squadss and make your own to go save the world with.

A fantastic read I highly recommend to anyone who wants to know about the power and strength of women or wants to share it.

I loved this book and think it should be required reading for every young woman! The stories are so interesting, many people that I have never heard of but that doesn't matter. It just gives so much power to the idea that women have not always been weak and downtrodden in the past; there are so many strong women that we should admire. It's not a book that I read all in one go but it was great to dip into on a regular basis. Young women who love to read would really like this book. The only annoying thing I found was the many twee and cringeing Americanisms within the text. Yes, I know it was written by an American but some of the language was just far too cheesy for me and it would have been a better read without it. I'd heartedly recommend stories within this book to my A level sociology students or students who are studying women's studies or gender studies at uni.

One of the biggest missions we have at FangirlNation is to encourage girls and women to understand that our friendships are some of the most important things in our lives.  While modern women have squad goals, we are discovering more and more the important friendships of history. In the new book by Sam Mags, Girls Squads: 20 Female Friendships That Changed History, readers get a chance to read about women who teamed up to win sports competitions, fought to get into medical school, changed the rules, and even some who became pirates.

Girl Squads is written with an interesting style that is both fun to read for adults but fully accessible to preteens and older.  Each section is also accompanied by illustrations by Jenn Woodall. The book is thoughtful, fun, and brings to light important friendships from women across the world and in all walks of life. 

Girl Squads comes to stores October 2, 2018.

Give me a book that explores historical figures in short, illustrated essay format, and I’m so there. There are a number of books that do this really poorly, it’s true, but the ones that get it right get it really, really right. Luckily, Sam Maggs’ new book, Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships That Changed History, illustrated by the incomparable Jenn Woodall, is one of the latter.

As someone who isn’t a particularly dedicated student of history, I enjoy books like Girl Squads because they present historical figures in a digestible way that holds my interest. In this case, Girl Squads starts with “Athlete Squads”, a section I didn’t expect to love nearly as much as I did (because Sports are generally Not My Thing), then jumped into “Political & Activist Squads,” followed by “Warrior Squads, then “Scientist Squads,” then my personal favorite, “Artist Squads.” Each section features essays written in Maggs’ informative-but-approachable style, showcasing the contributions of various women in history—and their teammates, siblings, friends, or any combination thereof—to their various areas of expertise.

To my surprise, one of my favorite features in Girl Squads is actually the essay about the 1964 Japanese Olympics women’s volleyball team, labeled by their Russian rivals as “The Witches of the Orient.” Until I was randomly paired with a volleyball player for a roommate in my freshman year college dorm room, I knew very little about the sport, but it’s now become one of the few that I kind of love. Maggs’ clearly exhaustive research on the 1964 Japanese women’s team sparked a desire to learn more about them, which, in my opinion, is the mark of a good essay—especially in a collection that explores so many figures in such a short page span.

I also want to learn more about Manon Roland and Sophie Grandchamp, two politically-active French revolutionaries whose friendship, Maggs acknowledges, reads more like romance than anything else. (Just gals bein’ pals!) Roland is asumed to have ghost written most of her husband’s missives, seeing as she initially radicalized him and she was more politically savvy than her husband or the many men who organized in their Parisian home.

She once said, “I let the men do the talking—I particularly enjoy listening to old men who imagine that every word they say is a revelation to the listener and who think that all I am capable of is stitching a shirt and adding up figures.” This profile on her in The Paris Review is incredible, and I’ve added her Memoirés to my reading list for 2019. She wrote her memoirs in jail before she was guillotined, and Grandchamp smuggled the pages out and hid them where (hopefully) no one would look. I’m excited to be heartbroken over what Maggs describes as a lifelong, incredibly deep love for each other, as described in Roland’s memoirs.

Girl Squads isn’t exclusively about female friendships, though Maggs explores some of the most famous gal pals in history. Take, for example, the notorious lady pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose friendship (and possible romance?) is immortalized in everything from books to movies to bronze statues. Their relationship is the stuff of pirate legend, and I always get really excited when I see them included in an anthology like this one. I don’t know if Maggs could have written this book without including them, though I know there must have been some hard editorial decisions made to limit this collection to just 20 incredible team-ups.

In addition to exploring those intimate, one-on-one or small group friendships, Maggs also examines women teaming up throughout history to wreak havoc, effect change, or some combination thereof. This includes scientists, like the West Area Computers, including Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (the incredible NASA mathematicians who were depicted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures—you know, the black women who put man on the moon?), as well as women who fought in wars, including the Red Women of Finland, a revolutionary fighting force who fought to murder members of the bourgeoisie after Russia returned Finland to full independence in the early 20th century. There are women from recent history (like, as recently as 2017) and women from ancient times. There are so many interesting women in this book. I won’t list them all, because I think you should experience their stories for yourself, but trust me: each essay is as fascinating as the last.

I most enjoyed the essays about individual friendships, I think, but the historical research in this book has sparked my interest in a big way. I love how Maggs explores the connection between women who were actively friends and women who teamed up to fight for a common cause, even if their individual relationships weren’t necessarily publicized or well-known. The balance of these different stories is great, and it makes the book flow really well.

The pacing of this book is absolutely fabulous; Maggs writes as if she’s telling you a really interesting story at a party. I didn’t want to put this book down and neither, I think, will you. Whether you’re interested in history or just stories about badass women, check out Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships That Changed History. I think you’ll enjoy the read.

Oh, and Jenn Woodall’s illustrations? Stunning, as always. I love the way Woodall draws women and girls—I was stoked to see her name on this project and her work did not disappoint.

Girl Squads is available in bookstores October 2, 2018 through Quirk Books. I received an advanced e-galley from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Overall rating: ★★★★
Recommended for: Readers interested in history, women’s studies, and approachable essays about the two

It reminded me of Penelope Bagieu's Brazen, with the difference that this book is in prose and Bagieu's was in graphic novel form. It's one of many new anthologies popping up that intend on bringing to light women's role in history that had previously been overshadowed. It was cute, the writing style was quirky and fun, and it was great to learn about the historical effects of powerful female friendships.

I've been reading a lot of books similar to this - the female friendship trend is real! This was a fun look into different female friendships around the world and spanning several time periods. I liked the casual, conversational tone the author took, but think that this would be better marketed to YA instead of adults!

If this book had been written in the 70s it would have been called something like Sisterhood is Powerful. Only a small number of the essays could not have been written then and I am not sure that Sam Maggs' book adds considerably to the feminist archive. It is interesting for having gathered together 20 stories from across the centuries and the globe which relate how women together have overcome the odds to achieve in fields of sport, warfare, politics, science and art (Maggs' categories). However I would like to have seen more in a book written near the end of the 2nd decade of the 21st century. Maggs does not distinguish between for example the achievements of the seven women who were the first medical students in the UK and the 'Warrior Squads' who killed and maimed. She does not offer any critique of violence. Nor does she attempt to analyse the intersectionality apparent in these tales, whereby not only gender but race, culture, language, religion and class combine to demonstrate how powerful the obstacles to be overcome by the women she discusses. I do not know who the intended audience of this book is but the author's overuse of words such as 'badass' and 'dude' make me suspect that she is attempting to appeal to a younger audience. I personally don't think this is the way to do this. The book is illustrated with line drawings (not all complete in the ARC I read) and these do enhance the text.

I have been loving the trend of anthologies celebrating influential women which have been coming out lately, and this is one of the best of the bunch. Decent length descriptions of a variety of women from a range of countries and fields, several of whom I had heard of, but plenty that I hadn't. A light-hearted narrative voice and humorous asides make sure it doesn't get too heavy, but at the same time leaves the reader in no doubt just how amazing the women's accomplishments were. Particular favourites included the Blue Stockings group who were fabulous literary socialites and the Japanese women's volleyball team who helped restore some of their country's pride after WW2, but honestly all of the women here were equally inspiring. I will definitely be recommending this to the kids at my school.

A fascinating and fun read! Each chapter highlights the lives of interesting, strong, and empowered women from a variety of backgrounds. I particularly liked that the book focused on some lesser-known figures throughout history as well - it was quite informative! Definitely recommended for adult and teen audiences alike.