Women of Note - M.J. Buckman - ★.½

AUTHOR: M.J. Buckman

GENRE: General Fiction.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 1, 2025

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fiction about a middle-aged library assistant who discovers a new purpose in life after learning about some unknown historical women through letters. This book could have been outstanding given its premise, but the execution was truly lacklustre in every way, whether writing or plot development or character detailing or the “letters”. I am so disappointed at the missed opportunity because with better writing and editing, this would have been an easy recommendation to make.

Plot Preview:

Helena, who is in her mid-fifties, is a library assistant but not so happy with her job as it isn't exactly what she thought it would be – she truly thought she would get more time to read.

When a library patron, eighty-six-year-old Cynthia, comes to Helena with a series of letters collected by her late historian daughter and written by unknown women achievers from across history, Helena finds herself fascinated by these new names and their lives. Cynthia and Helena start meeting regularly not just to discuss the letters and the women but also to catch up with each other’s lonely lives. As Helena gets new insights from the letters, she starts making some changes in her own thinking.

The story comes to us in Helena’s third-person POV, with a multitude of letters written in first-person from various historical women.

Bookish Yays:

💌 The title with its pun on the word ‘note’. Clever and apt for this novel.

💌 The concept of giving relatively unknown women achievers from various eras and locations some well-deserved recognition.

💌 The historical details about the women in the letters – quite informative. I knew the names of only a few of the included women, so I appreciate learning about more women whose names have been brushed aside by (men all through) history. I also appreciate that the plot included a few non-white, non-Western ‘women of note’.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

✉ While the list of references at the end is impressively extensive, it is tough for me to take it seriously when Wikipedia is quoted as the first valid point of research for every historical woman. Then again, it is better than using ChatGPT, I suppose. 🤔

Bookish Nays:

📩 Helena – a poor lead for such a complex story. Paradoxical in many ways (loves books but doesn’t know many basic facts related to libraries and books including book bans!), self-effacing to the point of being annoying, and judgemental to the core. It was very tough to relate to her, let alone root for her. I failed to see why the other characters, especially Cynthia, were so easily enamoured of her.

📩 Helena is supposed to be in her mid-fifties, but not once does she feel or act her age. Her portrayal is more like a naïve twenty-something, except for her aches and pains. Even the other characters, with the sole exception of Cynthia and possibly Lily, behave much younger than their declared ages.

📩 The storytelling is dry. Most of the writing contains telling instead of showing and becomes needlessly informative. (To the extent that even definitions are provided at times within the main content! Please allow readers to use their brains. We don’t need so much spoon-feeding!)

📩 The framing device of using Helena’s interaction with Cynthia to present historical stories of women through letters written by them just doesn’t work. There's no introduction to many of the women, so we learn who they are only as we read through their letters. However, the letters don’t always make their era clear. Given that they span from BCE days to the recent past, there should have been better clues about the period the women were alive in.

📩 The above letters are by various historical women (the “source” of these letters is explained in the book) and they range from death bed instructions to confessions to manifestos to future plans. But no matter what, none of the letters sound like letters. Rather, they feel like biographical fact dumps. While the reason for this odd epistolary tone is partially clarified in the final section, it still makes the letters feel like tedious history textbooks. The lack of a distinct voice in each letter (the reason for which is explained later in the narrative) further adds to the monotony. One of the letters contains the abbreviation ‘LGBT’ when it was supposedly written by a woman in the 1960s. The term didn’t come in being until the late 1980s.

📩 It’s not just the letters that are problematic. Most of the conversations in the contemporary timeline also feel fake and forced. I struggled to stay invested in any character because of this.

📩 The big reveal about the letters is guessable and evident much before the characters even thought of the issue. I didn’t get how no one wondered about it before; it was so very obvious a red flag.

📩 As is common in debut fictional works, the book chucks in a whole load of unrelated themes in the main plot: book banning and censorship, LGBT rights, mental health issues, racism, parental trauma, grief over the death of loved one, gaslighting, infidelity, sexual orientation,… It just felt like a cluttered mess after a point.

📩 Why was a romantic relationship shoved in when there was absolutely no need for one in this storyline? (And the relationship wasn’t even convincing!) And why was there a stress on a character’s confusion about their sexual orientation when the end result was a traditional male-female relationship?

📩 Why the fascination with ‘C’ names!? A single book with Carol, Clara, Cynthia, Chris, Constance, and Colin? This is not even counting the noteworthy women whose name started with the same letter such as Christine. Carol and Clara were especially easy to muddle up.

📩 Why are the chapter headings in the name of multiple characters when every chapter came from Helena’s third-person? The only times this made sense was when the chapter was a letter from that character’s POV. Otherwise, it was just strange.

📩 Why use the F word in a book that is supposed to be uplifting? One particular page had four ‘F’ occurrences within a couple of paragraphs.

📩 The overly convenient HEA ending – unbelievable.

All in all, this has been an utterly disappointing experience for me. The concept is great but the letters idea and the writing style just doesn't work out. I never imagined being so bored reading stories of inspirational historical women. I feel terrible being so critical of a debut indie novel, but I have to be honest: I simply didn’t like most of it.

The book might work if you skip Helena’s narrative and just read the letters (keeping in mind that they aren’t true to life and not so reader-friendly with their stress on ‘telling’) to learn more about the women time forgot. Then again, given the writing structure, I am not sure if this would be easy to do.

Sorry, but I cannot recommend this book. Perhaps if you aren’t so fussy about writing styles, it might click better with you.

1.5 stars, all for the (non-Wiki) research and intent, and none for the writing or characters.

My thanks to Uplit Press for providing a complimentary copy of “Women Of Note” via the Library Thing Early Reviewers Program at my request. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.