Karlene Faith has added her name to the list of authors willing to try to figure out why Madonna – the singer, not the religious icon – alternately pleases and pisses off so many people. Faith’s work as an associate professor of criminology at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, and her previous book, Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance, should give her unique insights into the woman who capitalized on the public’s fascination with a “bad” girl.

From her feminist perspective, she examines Madonna’s early years, her various identities, ambitions, and business acumen, as well as the sometimes incompatible public and media response. She documents the mainstream media and the alternative press, whose reactions, as we know, ranged from support to veiled resistance to outright hostility, although for different reasons. Madonna’s made it her business to defy definition, and unfortunately Faith’s analysis suffers the same fate.

Faith is more ardent fan than critic: “I hope I have humanized Madonna even while holding her in awe.” Faith’s defence of Madonna’s artistry and business skills sometimes gets in the way of her critical abilities. But she decided against including Madonna’s lyrics because they might seem “trite, and sometimes silly” without the benefit of music, which to me seems as harsh a criticism as the ones she spends pages refuting. And while Faith complains that most of Madonna’s critics are men who objectify her, after 200 pages of Faith’s considerate defence of misunderstood Madonna, a blast from that nasty Norman Mailer would be a welcome respite. And this is a problem with Madonna: Bawdy & Soul. The selected quotations Faith includes start to seem more interesting than the book itself. But for those interested in an overview of the culture’s response to Madonna, Faith’s compiled a solid list of reference material, a filmography, a list of her songs, and the all-important index.