Book Review: The Feminine Sixth: Women for the Defense

With accuracy and painstaking care, Andrea Lyon’s The Feminine Sixth: Women for the Defense documents and probes the exceedingly personal and revelatory accounts of being a woman criminal defense attorney as told by nine accomplished lawyers in the setting of a symposium for a presentation for Woman’s History Month. However, the discussion never happened. But it did — kinda. This nonfiction plus fiction equals a new form of literature that is sort of (literary) legerdemain where virtual reality meets documentarian prose. Most of all, it is a true page-turner. I read it in one sitting (while taking a break from preparing for trial, writing and filing a 40-page federal presentence memorandum, dealing with a breaking death case, and an international double death case). Yes, it is that good.