So about this book ... mixed feelings. Three and a half stars, rounded down at first but maybe we'll round up, because it's still a well-crafted volume, with a fabulous bibliography.

On the one hand, a good bit of it, especially in the first few chapters, reads like a middle-school pop magazine, except instead of talking up cute musicians she's rationalizing why this or that serial murderer wasn't really a bad person, but rather a victim of circumstance. If this one had access to anti-depressants, or if that one were independently wealthy, perhaps they'd not have been so desperate. I think especially now, when public violence seems to pop up everywhere, excusing murder because the murderer may have had a rough life is a dangerous game.

Otherwise we found it a fun and informative read. Perrin obviously did a lot of preparation for this work, and her illustrations are often poignant.

We read The League of Lady Poisoners as a library ebook, via hoopla. That had its pros and cons; for example the Index has handy hotlinks, and some of the Sources entries do as well. We find it harder to flip around in ebooks than in hard copies though -- someone once likened them to scrolls (ebooks) and codices (physical books) and that really stayed with us.

We'd recommend the book for its trippy bios and fab sources. There's not as much science (bioscience, toxicology, botany, etc.) as we'd have liked, but it makes up for it with edutainment value as well. Some of the historical entries were stronger than others, too. It's not a main reference volume so much as a hook, or a quick survey, or even a refresher. And, as mentioned, valuable for the Sources, and charming illustrations.