Wild Girls is a book that inspires travel and curiosity. The lives of the women were well-researched and informative.

Delighted to include this title in The Globe and Mail newspaper’s extensive annual Holiday Gift Books package in the weekend section of Globe Arts.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short read about women of adventure. I only wish it had been a bit longer! It was especially interesting to hear how nature and the outdoors impacted and informed Black and Indigenous women, as their stories are so rarely told and their safety in these spaces is something to be protected.

The cover is also wonderful!

Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for the ARC!

An extremely informative and well written book on a topic I knew very little about, definitely going to be recommending this one!

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review!

Wild Girls is a gem of a short book—easily read in a single day, filled with brief but descriptive biographical sketches of several notable women and their engagement with the outdoors.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Tiya Miles has taken several familiar figures, such as Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott, and rotated our focus to concentrate not on their most famous actions but the environment in which they acted. It makes complete sense, of course, that Tubman would have had intimate knowledge of the natural world and drew on it while carrying out her Underground Railroad rescue journeys—but I had never really thought about that element of her life until Miles skillfully elucidated it in Wild Girls.

In Chapter 3, Miles shares the story of an Indigenous girls’ basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana that encountered both freedom and restriction in the sport. Students at a residential school, they were supposed to be learning domesticity and leaving behind their “wild” Native culture. Playing basketball provided the girls with space to break free—to run and play and escape the school’s stifling atmosphere. But it also put them on display: when the team traveled elsewhere to play, they preceded their games with staged shows presenting a simplified version of Indigenous practices. In 1904, the Fort Shaw students had the opportunity to travel to St. Louis; once there, they lived in a “model Indian village” at the World’s Fair, part of an exhibit that invited fairgoers to gawk at so-called “natives” from around the world.

Miles pulls together enticing scraps of research materials to build the argument of Wild Girls, showing that while sometimes engagement with the outdoors can only be teased out through careful reading, it offered women from a variety of backgrounds the chance to move beyond prescribed social and cultural norms. Drawing on her own love of nature and activist work to make the outdoors a safe space for all community members, Miles uses this short but compelling book to argue that we should celebrate “wild girls”—not only the ones among us today, but those in the past, who are easy to find once we go looking for them.

✨ Review ✨ Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles; Narrated by Janina Edwards

I'm a Tiya Miles stan so I went in with high expectations and wasn't disappointed. Miles provides a series of short chapters exploring how girls and women throughout US history have explored and played and worked in the wild, learning from the wild all the wild.

These women -- some well known like Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott, others lesser known like Jane Schoolcraft and the girls of the Fort Shaw boarding school basketball team -- challenged bounds of racism, sexism, and other oppression in the U.S. Tubman used the stars and her knowledge of the outdoors to bring enslaved peoples to safety; Alcott wrote a tomboy Jo, celebrating her own youth in the outdoors; the girls of the Fort Shaw girl's basketball team introduced areas in the US to women's basketball and setting a whole new standard of play (pushing back against the strictures of boarding school life).

The book's short and isn't necessarily providing new and original content as much as providing a new spin on historical content and literature analysis that's already out there. I loved this interpretation and the ways it challenges us to look for women & girls in the outdoors. She ends by challenging us to think about equitable access to green spaces in the U.S. today and our responses to climate change

I enjoyed the audio version -- the narration was great, and while I wished at some points I had a paper copy to refer back to, I really liked it. There are a few places where she's making a digression to provide context where it's not clear if it's diverged into digression versus changing directions, but I think that's probably more clear in the written text.

Overall, a great way to delve into mini biographies of some incredible women and the historical context of the times in which they lived!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: history / environmental non-fiction, outdoors and nature, mini-biographies
Setting: U.S.
Length: 4 hours, 4 minutes (under 200 pages)
Pub Date: Sept 19, 2023

Read this if you like:
⭕️ biographical vignettes of US women from a variety of backgrounds
⭕️ stories of women in the outdoors
⭕️ historical narratives focused on race & gender & inequity

Thanks to Highbridge Audio, W.W. Norton, and #netgalley for an advanced e-copy of this book!

*4.5 rounded to 5*
As female who is finishing her PhD in science with a focus on ecology, I I could have easily read 400 pages by Tiya Miles on this topic. However, I realize that this was published in Norton's new "shorts" series which has a mission of sharing important stories in under 200 pages.

I love her writing and ability to give voice to those who are often marginalized. The book is well researched, and the use of archival evidence through pictures and journal quotes really contributes to the argument that these women were integral in shaping society. It was obvious that Tiya Miles was mindful about the women selected for the book, and she provided strong evidence for their "wildness" as well as societal impact. I also appreciated how she weaved the women in this book together noting similarities in their experiences with nature and societal expectations. My one disappointment was that it barely covered women of the 20th century past like 1920. Perhaps there could be a part 2? :)

Overall, I loved this short collection. The individual chapters could stand alone easily as course readings, but the whole book could also be easily integrated into a science, politics, or history course. I think this would allow for great student-led conversations too!

Toya Miles's 'Wild Girls' is a concise and fluidly written text, tracing some of the women who found empowerment and inspiration for activism -- variously feminist, abolitionist, indigenous, and environmental -- in the natural world around them throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the US. Miles's compassionate, well-researched links between these women -- and their girlhoods outdoors -- offer a compelling case for the importance and power of outdoor space and access to nature in our formative years. Her treatment of women in these spaces never slips into drawing a problematic closeness between femaleness and nature, but rather poses the natural world as a site in which girls vitally encountered ungendered roles, offering them a sight of a world beyond the confines of cultural gender roles. The outside world -- beyond the white settler 'Utopias' of the 19th century -- is also demonstrated to be a pivotal site of activism against slavery, racism, and the unfair treatment of indigenous peoples. Whilst Miles's text focusses on the US, it is easy to see how her approach is applicable all over the world in women's political history.

Miles's work holds the promise and potential to be hugely inspiring to young women and girls just delving into the importance of their place in environmentalism, in feminism, and in anti-racism; for young women trying to find their place outdoors; or for those already interested in environmental or gender history and seeking to expand their horizons with this accessible and fascinating account of America's pioneering women outdoors.

Thank you to W W Norton and NetGalley for the free ebook in exchange for my honest review : )

Discover how the outdoors helped shape these historical trailblazing women. Fans of history and biography will enjoy this unique look at these women.

I loved this book! A great introduction into the connection between feminism and nature. I particularly enjoyed learning about the basket ball team and government boarding schools.

In a world of Barbies, Tiya Miles brings Wild Girls to women who find solace in the natural world. Wild Girls is a must read to understand the interconnection of our feminist history and our nature world. The way the author plants a story of comparison and compassion and triumph to a weed and Harriet Tubman is master level writing. Fundamental women’s history revolutionized and witnessed under the “midnight sky and the silent stars.” This natural world witnessed the raise and triumphant of incredible women in American History. This book is for the wild reader who challenges the narrative of what our women and daughters should be and boldly strives to showcase why our daughters deserve to be in every outdoor space available in the natural world. A perfect gift for parents of children, to the outdoor enthusiasts, the historian, the nature lover!

Wild Girls was an enjoyable book overall. I learned new information about the lives of women in history that I am familiar with, such as Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, Dolores Huerta, and Sacagawea. I didn't know these women had such a personal connection to nature. I REALLY enjoyed learning about the Fort Shaw female basketball team. I have been learning quite a bit about Indian residential/boarding schools in North America this year and Wild Girls definitely added to my knowledge about them.

The main thing that I struggled with reading this book was the writing style. The frequency and method of how Miles connected the different stories was difficult for me to follow. I think I would have preferred a more encyclopedic approach to reading about the different women. The writing often made me feel like I was going in circles and I struggled to remember who was who.

Thanks to the publisher and author for letting me review this book. This was an interesting read about women who went against the grain, the conventional norm of society that said women had to be prim and proper, wear dresses and corsets, etc…

Expertly mixing nature, history and memoir, Tiya Miles tells the story of legends like Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Grace Lee Boggs and more- illuminating their individual stories, full of triumphs and tragedies, and centering their marginalized voices to tell the larger story of the United States. Readers will enjoy learning more in depth about these absolute icons (and others that you may never have heard of), their times, their art, and their resistance to colonialism, slavery, and oppression, actions whose consequences have endured to this day. This slim book packs a whole lot that will make your heart ache and also give you hope and appreciation for the resilience of women and nature and activism.

What a fun, well-researched and documented essay on a wonderful assortment of role models! This will be an excellent tool to use with teens learning about research and literary criticism. It is short and certainly not intended to be exhaustive, but it’s a delightful glimpse at women connected through their relationships with the outside world.

I absolutely loved reading this book. I was completely drawn into the topic and could not stop reading it.