BOOK REVIEW - ⭐⭐⭐


Warriors, Witches, Women: Mythology's Fiercest Females by Kate Hodges

This book is a guide to mythical women and female creatures across history and across the globe. It's clearly a very feminist interpretation of these women's stories and for that reason I really liked it. Kate Hodges has several sections to the book that split the mythical female creatures into different categories: warriors, witches, bringers of misfortune, elemental spirits and munificent spirits. 

Kate Hodges made these women much more relevant and accessible to the modern day as she discussed how these women stories came about, how their image changed due to patriarchal pressure. Hodges attempts to almost rehabilitate these mythical creatures to show how there were positive aspects to their stories. She also unpicks as to how some of them have been vilified because they've been the victim i.e. Medusa and Futakuchi-Onna. 

I really liked that Hodges included mystical beings from more than just Greek and Norse mythology which I feel like is generally the focus of these kinds of books. She had a gender-fluid Aboriginal god/goddess, Vietnamese goddess, Mesopotamian goddesses, Japanese beasts, African goddess, and Mexican spirits to name a few. Lots of these mythical beings I'd never even heard of.

There were 50 different mythical beings in the book and each one had 3-4 pages about them. Hodges included references to where their stories originated, how their stories changed over time and how that related to modern women. I think the major disappointment for me was that some of these names are in different languages or uncommon to me and just a reference to how to pronounce them would have been really helpful. 

I also think that Hodges attempts to bridge her stories to modern day were a little stretched at times. When she wrote about the Japanese being Futakuchi-Onna it felt very generic as to how women are expected to be silent, not expected to eat. However, this "beast" originated in Japan and I feel like Hodges didn't focus enough for me in many instances on why these mythical beings got distorted in these specific cultures. So whilst it was really good she included lots of different beings from across the globe, I still wanted more. 

Overall, this was enjoyable but I wasn't quite as immersed as I'd hoped. There was a little something missing from this book.

eArc provided by NetGalley.