A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls

Jessica Spotswood

Mar 2016 · Candlewick Press

About this ebook

From an impressive sisterhood of YA writers comes an edge-of-your-seat anthology of historical fiction and fantasy featuring a diverse array of daring heroines.

Crisscross America — on dogsleds and ships, stagecoaches and trains — from pirate ships off the coast of the Carolinas to the peace, love, and protests of 1960s Chicago. Join fifteen of today’s most talented writers of young adult literature on a thrill ride through history with American girls charting their own course. They are monsters and mediums, bodyguards and barkeeps, screenwriters and schoolteachers, heiresses and hobos. They're making their own way in often-hostile lands, using every weapon in their arsenals, facing down murderers and marriage proposals. And they all have a story to tell.

With stories by:
J. Anderson Coats
Andrea Cremer
Y. S. Lee
Katherine Longshore
Marie Lu
Kekla Magoon
Marissa Meyer
Saundra Mitchell
Beth Revis
Caroline Richmond
Lindsay Smith
Jessica Spotswood
Robin Talley
Leslye Walton
Elizabeth Wein

Ratings and reviews

I was SO looking forward to this short story collection, and I was SO disappointed. Unfortunately, this seems to be the general consensus from people who have read this book. The last time I read a collection of short stories, I absolutely loved it, and I found countless new authors that I was dying to read. As I picked up A Tyranny of Petticoats, I was expecting the same thing to happen, but I was sadly mistaken. This book is advertised as "15 stories of belles, bank robbers, and other badass girls," and the stories are arranged chronologically through American history, ranging from the Caribbean in the early 1700s to Chicago in the 1960s. I expected empowering stories of amazing, kick-ass American women throughout history. Yes, the stories all focused around female characters, but honestly I only found a few of them to be really inspiring or empowering. Most of them were just mediocre. I really disliked the first three stories of this collection. It felt like not enough happened in Mother Carey's Table and The Journey. They felt like they were chapters from a larger novel and I was missing the big picture. My least favorite story in the entire collection was Madeleine's Choice by Jessica Spotswood. I really enjoyed the writing style, so initially I rated this story a little higher, but the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the main character of Madeleine was whiny and spoiled and the farthest thing from a strong, self-sufficient woman. She really drove me nuts. Despite my disappointment with the beginning of this book, I kept reading and I found a couple stories that I really loved. I have a soft spot in my heart for Civil Rights Era history, so The Whole World is Watching by Robin Talley really struck a chord with me. It was a beautiful and powerful story. My absolute favorite story of the bunch was High Stakes by Andrea Cremer. However, this was also one of the biggest disappointments for me. What made me so angry was that this absolutely amazing and unique plot line was wasted on a 20 page short story. I think a lot of my disappointment in these stories is that they were way too short. Most of them were around 20 pages long, and it just didn't give the authors enough time to tell a story with real value. Most of them felt like they could be a decent chapter in a full-length novel, but they just didn't cut it on their own.

About the author

Jessica Spotswood is the author of the Cahill Witch Chronicles, a historical fantasy trilogy. She grew up near the Gettysburg battlefield, in Pennsylvania, but now lives in Washington, D.C., where she works for the District of Columbia Public Library system as a children's library associate.