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Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls authors Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo.
‘So needed, so timely’ … Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls authors Elena Favilli (left) and Francesca Cavallo. Photograph: Andrzej Liguz/moreimages.net/The Guardian
‘So needed, so timely’ … Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls authors Elena Favilli (left) and Francesca Cavallo. Photograph: Andrzej Liguz/moreimages.net/The Guardian

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: second volume to include Angela Merkel and JK Rowling

This article is more than 6 years old

The follow-up to Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli’s children’s book about women who changed the world is already seeing unprecedented demand

From mathematicians to firefighters and from Boudicca to Beyoncé, a new army of “rebel girls” is about to shoulder its way on to bookshelves in the follow-up to the most successful book in the history of crowdfunding, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

Another collection of bedtime stories about women who changed the world, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 is out on 28 February and is, according to the Bookseller, already seeing unprecedented demand. The magazine reports that the first print run for the second volume, which features the life stories of famous contemporary names such as German chancellor Angela Merkel and Harry Potter creator JK Rowling, as well as historic figures including Dutch exotic dancer and spy Mata Hari and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, is 100,000 copies, with another already under consideration.

Beginning life on Kickstarter in 2016, where authors Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli had set the goal of raising $40,000 (£28,600) to print 1,000 copies, the first Rebel Girls book quickly made history, raising more than $600,000 and going on to sell more than 1m copies around the world in 36 languages. Telling the stories of women such as tennis player Serena Williams, painter Frida Kahlo and aviator Amelia Earhart, the book won many famous fans, from Malala Yousafzai – whose story was also included – to Hillary Clinton. A Rebel Girls movement has also taken off, with protesters on last month’s Women’s March bearing Rebel Girls signs.

The authors feel the book captured a moment in history. “Something was building” in 2016, Cavallo told the Guardian in an interview in this week’s Review. “We felt Rebel Girls was so needed, so timely”.

The two were working in Silicon Valley when they were inspired to write the book; Favilli had written an article about sexism in the tech industry for the Guardian, and found herself attacked online. The vicious response “pushed me even more to think that our next project should target girls and give them a strong, empowering message,” she said, adding: “We always say that Rebel Girls comes from a very personal place, but it is not just joyful and celebratory – it is also a place of pain.”

After the success of the first volume, the pair, who have been a couple for a decade, asked their readers for suggestions to be included in the second volume. These range from the New York-based Asian American firefighter Sarinya Srisakul, to the award-winning Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, and the first all-female anti-poaching unit in South Africa, the Black Mambas.

Cavallo was clear that they wanted to “stay away from saints”, with divisive figures such as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi included in the first volume. “We study men in history even if they were far from perfect … girls are taught to be likable at all times, and that is one of the strongest limits we place on the leadership of women,” she said.

They were also keen to find “larger-than-life moments” to write about in their subjects’ lives. So, while they looked into “many female chefs” in order to include one in the first volume, “when we found out that Julia Child started her career as a wartime spy, cooking anti-shark cakes to keep them away from bombs intended for German U-boats, we knew she was the right choice”.

Readers, the authors say, aren’t interested only in dragons or princesses. Cavallo told the Guardian: “It matters to show kids that these women are real, even though they probably won’t encounter them in the school curriculum … We’ve always wanted to celebrate work as the magic power that can transform the world … We wanted to invite kids to a world of wonder – a wonder that lives in reality.”

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