Different, intriguing and excellent characterisation. I adored the story and the cover is beautiful! Highly recommend.

An excellent examination of a variety of female friendships throughout the last centuries. An inspiring read.

Love adding to my library of strong women around the world. This is great for any collection and raising girls to be fierce.

I'll read anything by Sam Maggs and Girl Squads lives up to that promise. A strong, diverse look at female friendships in history and their influence on the world at large. Light and easy to read--definitely has appeal for a wide range of ages--but also engaging and thoughtful. In a world where women are often still portrayed as catty and unfriendly, it is an especially helpful book for younger readers who will be able to see so many women defying lazy stereotypes.

This is an entertaining starting point for people - probably teens - looking for an introduction to forgotten friendships across history. It's not the most indepth, and I didn't always love the writing style, but it's quite entertaining and introduced me to a few people and stories that I had never heard of before along with some better know groups.

I recently read Hannah Jewel's 100 Nasty Women of History, which is doing something similar but swearier. I found that quite confusing about who it was for (teens? adults) but this felt more squarely aimed at a not-quite adult and possibly activists.

My Goodreads review: This was a short, fun book about pioneering women.

Since it is too long, I'll add this: I had read of the divers from Jeju island because of Lisa See. While reading this book, I could not help but to wonder why Maggs chose the "girl squads" she highlighted here and why other authors are also shining a spotlight on these groups.

Exceptionally amazing, witty and humorous and badass. The ode to womanhood that we deserve. Sam Maggs's words are quirky and insightful. I stan.

I always loved reading stories of strong bonds between people. so I thought something like this would be perfect for me. I wanted to experience how people lean on each other, and how those relationships makes them stronger as the person. And I got fair amount of that, while picking up some historic fact along the way. Personally, I would have liked a visual representation of some sort, since stories like this can sometimes get a bit repetitive, and it's nice to see the person we are reading about.

This book was awesome! I learned so much about women throughout history and across disciplines that I'd never heard of before - from ancient times to present day! My favorites that I think will stick with me forever were the Haenyeo divers (look them up!) and the Zohra, the all-girl orchestra from Afghanistan. And I absolutely loved Sam Magg's writing style - it was like she was telling these tales to her own bffs with funny asides and comments thrown in along the way. A very casual and easy style that made it a fun fast read!

I wanted to love this book so much but the writing style was grating. I'm all for conversational nonfiction for teens but not to the degree that it undercuts the significance of the actual facts that are being conveyed. Here it felt grossly performative, all "yasss queen" in situations that the author then acknowledges a sentence later were not really feminist successes. Also, in a lot of cases I didn't know much about the people in question (I did enjoy learning about the Japanese volleyball champs and the Korean diving village!) but I do know a lot about women's tennis, and the decision to write about Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys, who are really young and haven't had a chance to accomplish all that much (and certainly have not changed history in any meaningful fashion yet), instead of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, or I don't know maybe THE WILLIAMS SISTERS, was baffling and made me second-guess the author's background knowledge of the other fields.

A wonderful book chronicling the often overlooked/unhighlighted female friendships throughout history! I foresee this entertaining book being a great gift to share among best friends! Thanks NetGalley for providing and advance copy in exchange for an honest review!

From Darcy & Bingley ( Pride and Prejudice), Holmes & Watson ( Sherlock Holmes series) to Carraway and Gatsby ( The Great Gatsby), examples of male friendships a.k.a bromances are never in short supply. Women, on the other hand, are often characterised as being catty towards each other, being frenemies and generally being unsupportive towards each other.

Sam Maggs ' Girl Squads female friendships and/or support systems that have been created by women that have been overlooked in history but have made a huge impact. She highlights female badass pirates, Korean divers, the first British medical doctors to Dahomey warriors who have defied societal norms to empower themselves, survive and create opportunities for other women. It is admirable that she has brought together a diverse collection of stories from all around which seem to have missed from a lot of our history books. For example, personally, I never heard of the female Dahomey warriors from modern-day Benin when I learnt about the history of Africa. Plus, I only got to know about the Blue Stocking Society due to my bibliophilia.

From her language and style of writing (loads of side comments), it is clear that Maggs has a vivid feminist worldview and aims to empower female teens and young adults. The illustrations were also tastefully done. Since I received a review copy, I was disappointed that there were no footnotes or bibliography to bolster the points that were across the book and also for personal future library adventures.

A truly marvellous and inspiring collection, presented in plain, accessible language. I would love to see a televised serialisation of this book! Aside from being incredibly informative and empowering, humour is used throughout to great effect. All of the life stories contained within are remarkable to such an extent that, just when you think you’ve discovered your ultimate hero - along comes another one in the next chapter! I loved it so much that I gifted a few copies to friends this Christmas.

Rating would be more like a 3.5.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. It felt very much like many of the other books out there already about strong, historical women (and I am ALL for it!). I just wanted more.

Written by Sam Maggs (whose Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy I loved when I read it several years ago), Girl Squads is a collection of biographical vignettes that focus on groups of women, including sisters, friends, *ahem* “gal-pals,” colleagues, and more. Rather than focusing specifically on an individual women’s achievements, it instead looks at the way women can empower one another to do great things when they have a squad of other awesome women behind them.

It is easily the most colloquial of all the books, leading to the sensation that you’re sat sharing drinks with Sam as she chats away about the amazing women she has learned about that day. It’s filled with snark, sarcasm, and nerdy references—in the chapter about the women of SCOTUS, Sam tells us that “when their judicial superpowers combine, they become the VOLTRON of powerful female friendships”—which makes it a whole lot of fun to read. The bios in this book are also the longest by far, with each Squad receiving a full chapter over several pages to cover its exploits. This means that you can’t dip in and out nearly as quickly as you can with the other books but makes it great if you want something that little bit more thorough without reading a full-length biography.

This book also contained some of the least famous women included across all the books here, which made it very refreshing. The 1964 Japanese Women’s Volleyball Team, the Patriotic Women’s League of Iran, the Haenyeo Free-Divers of the Korea Strait, and the Trobairitz Feminist Musicians of Medieval France might not be the first groups that spring to your mind when you think of inspiring girl groups, but their stories are amazing and deserve to be better known. The book is divided into five sections, Athlete Squads, Political and Activist Squads, Warrior Squads, Scientist Squads, and Artist Squads, which gives you an idea of the variety of achievements covered in its pages.

If you think that female friendships are full of competition, catfights, and spite-then you can thank all the crappy writing that has filled our books and television screens for far too long. Sam Maggs takes a deep dive into 20 awesome female friendships that helped change the world and make it a better place.
Covering five categories-athletes, political and activist, warrior, scientist and artist squads, Maggs tells the stories of some pretty amazing ladies who stuck together to create change throughout history. Some are pretty well known ladies like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, as well as our three amazing ladies on the U.S. Supreme Court. Others were a joy to discover like the Haenyeo free divers who are continuing the 2,500 year-old practice of diving for the various sea creatures found on the sea floor or the Trobairitz who were active during the 12th century.
Sam Maggs covers the globe and all of time to bring us some of the most fascinating female friendships that have helped shaped history. I really enjoyed her points on how no matter how far back you go in history, women have worked together to bring about important change. It’s been through women working together, not alone, that brought about education and equality for women.
Maggs writing is both informative and entertaining. Her other titles look equally awesome and I’m looking forward to checking out more of her work.

Please see the following link for my blog's review of Girl Squads by Sam Maggs: https://wordsofmysteryblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/book-review-girl-squads-20-female-friendships-that-changed-history-by-sam-maggs/

2018 marks one-hundred years since some women were allowed the ability to vote in the United Kingdom. That means that, this year the market has been inundated with books that celebrate kick-arse women throughout the ages. Which is great.
Girl power? I am all for it.
But, unfortunately, it is November now (I mean, in some ways, November is also my birthday month so yay me). Which means I have read eleven months worth of books that commemorate the same one-hundred-or-so historical women and I beginning to experience some sort of genre-fatigue.
This means that Girl Squads has more than likely been allocated a lower rating than it would have been if the book had been released earlier in the year. I have read a whole range of absolutely gorgeous, love-filled books on the subject of historic women and, to stand out in the market this late in the year, the book has to be pretty special and Girl Squads should have done. I mean, with its illustrations and focus on female friendships, it managed to still hold my attention and some of the stories were truly fascinating (the Korean Haenyeo divers were absolutely amazing and truly a highlight of the collection), but overall? I couldn't bring myself to rate it any higher than the average in this truly saturated market.

Some of the stories turned out to be utterly boring - which was a sad surprise. I've skimmed through them. Apart from this, a nice book, although it could be more approachable.

There's plenty of books about the forgotten women of history that are being published lately and this book is a part of that movement. It tells the stories of fantastic and heroic pioneer women in many fields: sports, science, arts...The main difference between this book and all other is that this doesn't focus on individual women but in what we would now call "squads", groups of women being awesome, breaking boundaries and helping each other. That was probably my favourite part of it was, in a world that keeps telling stories about women hating women it was a nice refreshment to see all those women lifting each other up. The book is written in an easy and fun tone and the reading experience is fun while formative. The illustrations are really great and fit the style of the book perfectly.

I received a fee ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.