Personal experience and gathered anecdotes about staying safe as women fill this book compiled by two well-informed authors. While I wouldn’t call this a guidebook as much as a learning tool, the diverse content engages women and encourages utilizing our intuition, reasoning, and common sense.

By women for women ♀️👊

"..[who] gambled the safety odds of going to the grocery store after dark, juggled the challenges of traveling solo with children, or prayed that the handyman isn’t psycho."

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"..[who] knows how it feels to be unsafe just because you are a female in this world."

Very well written and researched. The invaluable information is told in an interesting way to easily absorb and stay engaged.

Strength. Power. Unity ♀️👊

This book has a lot of good information about staying safe. I do wish it went more in depth on some subjects and was less wordy, but I still got good information from it.

An interesting take on how to stay safe and, most importantly, trust ones own intuition. “Street smart” applies to more than safety outside the home; the authors cover online safety, recognize when one is being manipulated, violence in the home as well as self-defense. It’s a well-written book, not designed to scare (though, TBH, I had no idea of the extent to which women are targeted), but to offer practical advice on how not to be a victim.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

What happens when a pair of street smart, experienced women get together to share their insights, expertise, and advice with other women? Joy Farrow and Laura Frombach have done just that in their excellent STREET SMARTS SAFETY FOR WOMEN. While I've long prided myself on superior "spide-y sense" and awareness of my surroundings and individuals, I learned a great deal from their candid, well-written, and generous guidance. I will recommend this book to every woman I know, every person now that I think about it--don't be scared, but do be aware. Ultimately, their guide is empowering and practical and extremely useful. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

While I learned some from this book, I found it to be a little wordy and less of an actual street-smart guide and more of an “here are all the ways the people you know are out to get you” kind of book. I wish that there were some concrete tips in each chapter or at the end of the book, which would have made this a much better resource for people looking for safety tips. While Chapter 9 does address this, it would have been helpful to have more tips throughout the rest of the book that weren’t just focused on physical safety and included some tips for people who may be in emotionally, physically abusive situations or dealing with abuse online. While I learned some good information in this book, I feel like it could have been a lot shorter and that it left out some discussions of aspects of safety for women in situations like sex work, maids/cleaners, trans-women, truckers etc. that would have been helpful to know. The title of the book overall felt misleading from the actual content of the book, though the content was helpful and informative overall. 2.5/3 stars

The book wasn't bad, definitely had some really good and useful points that will be helpful to a lot of women. But really, the name is quite misleading. Even then the issue of safety in this book was described really well.

I thought this would be a guide to street smart safety because that's the title. But it's more about staying safe online which I found deceptive. There were parts that I was interested in and I gleaned some information that was useful but it wasn't what I thought it would be.