I enjoyed all the essays here, although I took particular interest in the papers on Lost Girl by Jennifer K. Stuller and Magi Madoka Magica by Lien Fan Shen - which is quite surprising, as I'm not familiar with the source material of either. I'd quite like to be now, though, so some things have been added to the to-watch pile.

Despite the fact that all of the essays here are informative and interesting, there's not, it must be said, a great deal of coherence in the book as a whole. I'm all for wide-ranging, but the subject matter here is so eclectic and little has been done to link it all together. The introduction, for instance, is a bare one-and-a-half pages; utterly inadequate for such a book. I tend to think that with a theme as broad as Heroines of Film and Television there needed to be some sort of generalist approach to go alongside what were often very close studies of heroines from very different genres... but there just wasn't.