Great Women Leaders, the fourth in Second Story’s Women’s Hall of Fame Series, belongs to the inspirational school of biography. Featuring 10 subjects who overcame various types of prejudice to make enormous contributions to society, the book aims to cheer on the readers, with author Heather Ball proclaiming to her audience, “You can do it!”

Aimed at readers ages 9 to 13, Great Women Leaders continues the series’ work of filling in the gaps of traditional history with the stories of influential women. Beginning with the first woman pharaoh, Hatshepsut, and concluding with Canadian Six Nations chief Roberta Jamieson, the anthology features an impressive range of international and historical subjects. However, Hatshepsut’s story – though interesting and exotic – feels out of place in this collection, since she predates her nearest colleagues by several thousand years. Including another woman or two from the intervening centuries might have made the grouping more cohesive.

Ball, a Toronto writer, neatly condenses a great deal of personal and historical information into these short, accessible biographies. She incorporates sophisticated vocabulary but accommodates a variety of reading abilities with clear definitions of terms and concepts. Though her prose style is lively and succeeds more often than not in striking an inspirational rather than a maudlin tone, the narrative style is uneven across the chapters. Some biographies, such as the life story of Thérèse Casgrain, read like annotated chronologies, jumping awkwardly from topic to topic, while others, including those of Rosa Parks and Wangari Maathai, are engrossing and coherent narratives. But overall the collection does important recovery work of women’s histories for young readers, both boys and girls, who enjoy learning about the lives of ordinary people who made a difference.