What do readers think of A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert? Write your own review.

This book, at times, was a struggle to read. It jumps among characters and generations in random order. I found myself referring to the Lineage Chart in front of the book over and over. I did, however, find it thought-provoking. Are our lives influenced through multiple generations by the actions and philosophies of one of our ancestors? This book would be a good choice for a woman’s book club. The questions it raises and the relationships it explores would open the door for many active discussions. It isn’t an easy read, but it is worth the effort.

The year is 1914 the eve of WWI and the British Women's Suffrage Movement. This is where the author introduces us to the matriarch of the Townsend family, Dorothy Trevor Townsend. Walbert creates a strong female who makes a controversial decision that will ultimately change the Townsend women for five generations. The only problem - Walbert's chronology of the characters was at best hard to follow, I had to keep referring to the lineage chart. Walbert weaves a tapestry of love, friendship, loss and regret that flows in the Townsend blood for centuries to come.

This book was hard to follow at times, but I enjoyed the themes she wrote about. The author was able to show how our family of origin subtly influences who we are today, even if we know little about our ancestors. This was done well as she often went back and forth in history to get this point across. I also enjoyed the overall theme of women's place in the world and if it really has changed since the 19th century. Because of the difficulty I had following characters I do not know If I would have finished this book if I had not received a review copy, the difficulty might have outweighed the good themes.

This book has a great opening phrase - "Mum starved herself for suffrage" are the first five words - giving me high hopes for the book, but it did not fulfill them. Overall, I found it slow and hard to finish. I did not mind the structure, which jumps around in time among several different generations of the same family, but I never could see any point to the various sections as interconnected pieces. Individual sections are entertaining, and the author writes well, with kind of clean, spare prose that I usually really like, but unfortunately there was nothing compelling about the build-up of sections as I moved from one to the next. I just could not see what it all added up to.

At times I had a very difficult time getting the characters straight and had to go to the beginning of the book to read as to who was who. So I cannot highly recommend this book - I found it tedious to read and really quite uninteresting.

I had a difficult time actually giving this book an overall rating. There were some parts of it that were so engaging as to be almost mesmerizing but other sections were completely blah, boring and almost incomplete. The chapter transitions between characters were not easy to follow. In fact, the family tree at the beginning of the book was a constant reference point for me. Dorothy Trevor and Evelyn were great stories of women in transitional times and all they believed in and suffered for their causes were tales well told. These stories rated a 5. The later generation not so and rated much lower. These sections seemed hurried and rather dull in comparison. All in all, this was an informative but inconsistent book.

This book jumped around so much that it was hard to follow. No character was developed adequately and the book at most was dull.

I had high hopes for this novel. The story is the kind of book I love to read. I couldn't get past page 40. The writing style and the history lesson was boring and dry. The characters' internal dialog was confusing. I had a hard time following the different random thoughts of the characters.

The characters were stilted, underdeveloped, and did not come alive. I didn't care what happened to them.