RaveThe Los Angeles TimesMapping women along a loose timeline, Hessel covers huge swaths of history in lively, lucid prose, positioning these artists within (or against) dominant genres. She documents not just what they created but also the obstacles they surmounted in doing so ... Almost every piece Hessel references appears in a photo, most in color and some in luscious, two-page spreads ... Hessel’s sweeping (though Western-heavy) 500-year-history is free of both academic jargon and essentialist rhetoric ... But in her (generally effective) effort to condense, Hessel occasionally drops key plot points ... Even so, what Hessel achieves here is extraordinary ... [A] spellbinding book.
Katie Hickman
PositiveThe Los Angeles Times... riveting ... Hickman’s writing is exquisite; her background as a novelist brings these women into dramatic relief. She has a keen eye for detail ... And yet, the logic of whom she includes is perplexing. Some of these women’s sagas are already well-documented...With a clearer through-line, these stories might offer a stronger antidote to the calcified mythology that gave us Gunsmoke and Yellowstone or, failing that, a better sense of how they helped shape our national identity ... Even so, this is an irresistible crazy quilt of Western history. A meticulous scholar, Hickman draws on diaries and memoirs to immerse us in these women’s lives and offer important correctives. Brave Hearted is an alternate history of a frontier that was home for some and a fantasy for others — a liminal space that existed in fact and folklore long after the Census Bureau decided it was gone.
