Reviews

Women Don't Owe You Pretty by Florence Given

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elizabethann's review against another edition

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inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.0

jashegerova's review against another edition

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4.0

4.5*/5

First off, i picked this book up because of how insanely beautiful it is. So colourful! So fun! Great illustrations! I thought this would mostly reiterate things I’ve already heard or read but needed a pick me up. And sure, it was occasionally on the preachy-feminist side, but actually this book is full of wonderful, good stuff (v eloquent, i know) - it mostly consists of the most positive of peptalks i’ve ever heard, a “best of” of all the tirades you hear drunken girls give their friends in club bathrooms. Some bits made me actually say HUH outloud; if i was a cartoon character there’d be a lightbulb turning on above my head a couple of times while i read this book. Most of all, i wish to god this book was around when i was younger - might’ve prevented me from being such a catty bitch/bad friend on many occasions. I will for sure be hitting my friends over the head with it for the foreseeable future. Thanks Florence!

pkrantz's review against another edition

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informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

jessielinden1's review against another edition

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2.0

I got a lot out of this book, mostly because I have for a long time been so disconnected from the forces behind it: feminism and influencers. I truly wish I’d read it as a teenager, but what I actually wish is that I had had a deeper understanding of what intersectional feminism was, who coined the term and why, read a lot more work by Black women, and just overall used more information to love myself more and grow my contributions to the world as a result of growing the fuck up. But I didn’t. So I’m doing it now, and there was a lot here that really resonated with me. There was also a lot that I already knew, and most importantly, there was a conspicuous lack of references. The small bit of acknowledgements at the end was a bad look IMO. To me this book comes off as a white woman profiting off unoriginal material that is easily traceable to Black women and other women, period. And to paraphrase someone who put it succinctly in the comments on this page: feminism doesn’t go with capitalism.
So for me Given isn’t exactly walking the walk as far as the meat of the book is concerned, but her art and personal narrative she of course owns and with much style.