The Girl Who Rode a Shark & Other Stories of Daring Women

Ailsa Ross’ The Girl Who Rode a Shark & Other Stories of Daring Women is a comprehensive work of middle grade nonfiction. The book is broken up into six sections, and each section includes anywhere from 7 to 10 women of historical significance. A former travel writer and student of law and women’s rights, Ross selected 50 female “adventurers” to showcase, spanning the centuries from 231 BC to modern day. The final pages include a glossary of terms, such as “activism”, “emancipation” and “colonialism”, as well as a listing of indigenous peoples and their geographic locations and a disclaimer about how geographical names change over time.

The first section, titled “The Artists”, highlights the accomplishments of nine women including: Lady Sarashina, the first travel writer in 1059 Japan, 19th Century British photojournalist Isabella Bird and 20th Century writer and explorer Emily Hahn who walked 373 miles across the Congo. Other trailblazers included in “The Artists” include Nellie Bly, Freya Stark and Josephine Baker. In the section titled “The Pioneers”, Ross showcases such famous females as the 19th Century American interpreter and explorer Sacagawea and the iconic pilot Amelia Earhart. Ross also provides profiles of lesser known females, such as Tueta, an ancient Roman pirate queen, and Canadian fur trapper Isobel Gunn who disguised herself as a man to gain employment with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1806.

“The Scientists” include astronaut Roberta Bondar and Jeanne Baret, the first woman to sail the globe in 1766 (who also had to disguise herself as a man), as well as American underwater scientist Sylvia Earle and Mongolian paleontologist and artifact rescuer Bolortsetseg Minjin. Fifteenth Century warrior Joan of Arc, Maori activist Whina Cooper, who marched for land rights in 1975, and The Body Shop’s ethical cosmetics entrepreneur Anita Roddick are all discussed in “The Activists”. The absence of Malala Yousef from this chapter on female activists is surprising given the famous women and girls included in other sections.

“The Athletes” section is not a who’s who of famous athletes, instead including the title’s free diving chef and shark rider Kimi Werner, long distance swimmer Diana Nyad and Arunima Sinha, an Indian amputee who climbed Mount Everest in 1986 with an artificial leg. “The Seekers”, made up of “women who have journeyed in search of meaning, love, safety”, is the final section in the book. Seekers include Isabel Godin, who found her way out of the Amazon rainforest after her family perished, 19th Century Sahara desert explorer Isabelle Eberhardt and Manon Ossevoort who drove her tractor from the Netherlands to the South Pole in 2005.

Ross’s book would be a useful resource for school-aged studies on topics such as women’s rights, female historical figures or biographies. The book is diverse both culturally and geographically, and the easy to navigate layout and bright engaging illustrations will quickly draw readers in. The inclusion of maps and a glossary make this book a good fit for school libraries and classroom collections. An alphabetical index by name would have been an added bonus for students looking to quickly find a particular person. The Girl Who Rode a Shark & Other Stories of Daring Women would work well coupled with Lisa Dalrymple’s book Fierce Women Who Shaped Canada to inspire and motivate young females as the two books are similar in format and scope and feature some of the same women.