Toler blows past all expectations with this thoroughly delightful, personable, and crucially important history of women warriors ... Her captivating writing style, which is marked by disarmingly cheeky footnotes, makes this trip through so much forgotten history an exceedingly pleasurable reading experience and her subjects are a treat to learn about ... a historian’s roar all libraries should welcome.
Toler reveals a history many readers will meet with surprise as well as fascination ... With such copious content, Toler has been careful to keep her book a manageable length: at just over 200 pages, Women Warriors is an easy entry to an expansive topic ... entertaining and informative history.
Throughout the book, [Toler] uses numerous footnotes, asides, comments, absurdities, and personal opinions that should have been included in the main text. However, once readers learn to scan them, they will clearly see a pattern of women who have consistently stepped up to fight, for a variety of reasons, including revenge or loss of family, lands, or honor ... A short book admirable for wide research that you can read in a day, if you don’t get bogged down in the footnotes.
[A] rousing if scattershot history of female soldiers throughout history focused on lesser-known figures ... There’s as much folklore as history; Toler allows that her sources contain uncertainty, embellishment, and 'poetic license,' and she devotes a great deal of space to probably mythical figures ... The stories here, real or legendary, are sometimes shallow, since details about some of these incidents can be scarce, but they are reliably entertaining and colorful.
