A quite harrowing and thrilling story about a lesser known disaster on the southeastern Colorado plains: a group of schoolchildren and their bus driver become caught in a freak late spring blizzard that grows so frigid and windy and they must fight for their survival through the next 30+ hours. Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest, the writers of the book, spent time interviewing the remaining survivors of the disaster, who never liked discussing the tragedy during their lives, and scoured public records and documents to retell this story.

I had only vaguely heard about the Pleasant Hill school bus disaster, not even sure where initially, but Harner and Secrest's book was enthralling and brutal to read along with as far as the actual bus survival part, relatively brief though it was at the beginning of this book. Then they move into the media attention that the surviving children got after the ordeal was over, which struck me as particularly topical in today's era of clickbait and online popularity, that news can be skewed for views and dishonesty reigns. Of course, a century ago it was done by Denver Post baron Fred Bonfils, who wanted clout and money, so he manipulated and exploited the disaster and put all the kids in uncomfortable positions just to make the news about it a little more sensational. This section of the book was the longest, and I understand why so much was written about it, of course, but it did drag on a bit.

Then the end of the book has an epilogue-style chapter about the surviving children's lives as they grew up and moved into adulthood, which was only sometimes interesting. I wished instead that Harner and Secrest would have written more about the broader reforms or reactions to the disaster, making changes to the school buildindg or buses, or policy changes that it inspired. The book could have been a bit more well-rounded that way, talking about each of the survivors, of course, but also institutions and what the response to everything was.

The authors of What's Her Name have a podcast, apparently, and, boy, can you tell. Perhaps I'm generalizing, but there seems to be a particular type of tone and vernacular to people who podcast, and Katie Nelson and Olivia Meikle unfortunately adopt every single one of those annoying habits in this book—which should have been a fascinating look at women lost or overlooked in history, but instead came across as some wannabe-cool-mom-style lecture about how history keeps on churning.

What's Her Name sparked some interest in me going to Wikipedia to read further about these women, instead of me actually being interested in the book itself. What was perhaps most annoying were the entries about women who were included merely because they were accessories to their more famous and vocal husbands (Anastasia Romanova, for example, and even Anita Garibaldi to some extent); it's as if the authors tried to make each story about individual women as dull and boring as possible rather than expanding on their stories to the best of their abilities. Plus, Nelson and Meikle obviously tried so hard to connect each woman to the passage of time and the ongoing procession of progress, even when the women they wrote about really didn't contribute anything of note to major world changes. Which is fine: not all women in history need to be some world-changing, groundbreaking person. But the authors tried way too hard to bring each woman back to the theme of the timeline of history, and it got quite tedious.

I have a few more famous women to look up and read more about now, sure, but unfortunately I couldn't learn much about them in this book. Stick to podcasting, Katie and Olivia, because nonfiction history writing is very not your forte.

A drag of a book, if I'm being honest. One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow could have been about half its length and still portrayed the story well enough, in probably a better-constructed and more engaging manner. The story of two women who have to learn how to survive with each other on the harsh Wyoming frontier for a year, Blackbird/Crow seems to have adopted the pace of that kind of slow, manual frontier life, with only occasional bits of interest thrown in that had to deal with survival.

And the story of survival was the most interesting, as was the relationship between the two women, Cora and Nettie Mae. Brought together by hardships that were largely Cora's fault (although her story was barely explained), I did appreciate the two women's relationships, tumultuous though it was. The problem was the pacing, for Cora and Nettie Mae and for all the characters. Cora's daughter, Beulah, was also a fascinating (if a little bit cliched) character, who I wanted to know more about and focus the book on her, but Paula Hawker skimmed right past the interesting parts of her in favor of a budding relationship with Nettie Mae's son Clyde. I was already so bored for the first half, and things only got interesting when I got to learn more about Beulah—and then Hawker ruined it by setting up Beulah and Clyde together and making them incredibly boring and predictable with each other.

This was another book that was recommended highly to me, and I figured, based on the frontier setting, that it might be interesting and relatable to things I know about. But it fell short and was quite the slog to get through.