The cover describes Maverick as a collection of "Extraordinary women from South Africa's Past."

There could not be more of an understatement on the many covers of books that abound on people, their lives, loves, and heroics. Lauren Beukes has somehow unearthed a collection of women so varied and so different that it is sometimes difficult to pull one's mind round from one unlikely story to another. Yet all are true, if written at times with a slight tongue-in-cheek style. Where, one cannot help asking, did Lauren unearth some of these characters from? Having asked that, though, others are such well-known icons of our social and political history that they are surprising only in that their stories are told from a new angle, or from a slightly bizarre take on the old stories of these as we knew them from school or history books or from the many stories about them in the newspapers.

With the sad stories of people like Sara Bartman and the tragedy of what happened to the Xhosa people because of the visions of Nongquawuse, Lauren takes one on a helter-skelter ride of fact and questions. As she says, "Was it suicide or murder? A culling of sick beasts that got out of control?" It could have been, of course, but history blames it all on the little girl, with quite lot of influence from her wicked fellow tribesmen like the 18-year-old Mlanjeni who actually did the persuading to kill off the cattle.

Having absorbed these new takes on old history, she suddenly leaps into the less well known. "Bessie Head," she tells us," spent too much living inside her head and consequently lost it." Indeed. It is the story of a woman who wrote wonderfully but never came to terms with her own life, ending up in poverty and alcoholism. And then there is the bizarrely told little gem on Elizabeth Klarer, who claimed to have been whisked off into space by an alien. To this day there are many who believe her stories, or so we are told.

At the other extreme are the more mundane. Dear Glenda Kemp, who I once had the fortune to give a lift to after she had been banned from performing in a village near Middelburg in the then Transvaal, is really just a good girl, doing a fun thing. Why one wonders, does she feature in among the political heroes and outer-space travellers? And Brenda Fassie, of course. She, too, is given the accolade of being included here in this eclectic mix.

At the end of it, Lauren Beukes makes no excuses for her choice of South African women. She has left many out, she says, but then many of them are still making their mark on society and are not yet ready to be included in a history like this. All in all a fun book, a delightful series of short stories, excellent bed-time reading, and a great choice for a gift.

Pixie Malherbe is a South African journalist and communication consultant. She was on newspapers for years, worked on women's magazines in London and then ran her own communication consultancy for about 12 years. She was President of IABC Southern Africa (International Association of Business Communicators) and was given their Chairman's award in Toronto in 1995. She is currently a stringer for local newspapers.

More Reviews
Virginia Woolf — The Will to Create as a Woman | Maverick
Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box | Pink Palace