Although there is extensive literature on Balinese wayang kulit, women dalangs (puppet masters) have received little scholarly attention. Jennifer Goodlander addresses this omission in a book that interweaves personal accounts of training, interviews with prominent female dalangs and reflections on the gendered structures of tradition in Bali. The book focuses on women and training, but Goodlander's larger intellectual project is to contribute to the understanding of changing traditions in Bali. She advances a nuanced approach to tradition that takes into account individual agency, institutional frameworks and gendered power roles. Tradition is conceptualized as ‘a system of power that is inextricably linked to gender hierarchy’ (p. 11), which necessarily circumscribes the scope of action and social meaning of women dalangs.

Goodlander explicitly asserts her positionality as a foreigner and a woman, placing her situated experiences in constant dialogue with previous scholarship, while warning about the limits of generalization. The author is careful when writing about ‘the Balinese’, aiming to ‘foreground this term as a conscious discursive construct rather than to erase the diversity of people living in the island of Bali’ (p. 10). Goodlander writes from the perspective of a scholar-dalang, and her personal experience of wayang kulit training with renowned male puppeteer I Wayan Tunjung constitutes the book's main narrative thread. The author proves an effective storyteller, interspersing academic reflection and vivid descriptions in an enjoyable book. Her accounts are detailed and informative, giving the book a novelistic quality that does not diminish its academic rigour. Particularly memorable is a description of how the author acquired her puppet box (pp. 69–75), which demonstrates that ‘there is more to having a puppet box, than simply owning one’ (p. 70). In these pages, Goodlander uses the work of cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai and anthropologist Angela Hobart to think through the nature of puppets and puppet boxes as bearers of tradition that are inextricably linked to performance, ritual, social and financial capital and gendered social expectations.

The book's structure is explicitly modelled after two well-known Balinese concepts. The first part (‘Sekala: The Visible Realm’) looks at practices and objects of tradition. The second part (‘Niskala: The Invisible Realm’) looks at the process of becoming a dalang, includes interviews with women dalangs and concludes with a reflection on the future of tradition in Bali. Chapter 5 describes the life experiences of several prominent women dalangs: Ni Ketut Trijata (the first female dalang in Bali), Ni Wayan Rasiani, Ni Wayan Nondri, Ni Nyoman Tjandri and Ni Wayan Suratni. Through the interviews and life stories, the reader gets a sense of their very different temperaments and attitudes to tradition, as well as the many circumstances through which they became dalangs. In spite of all their diversity, it is still notable that all of them were socially connected to men who encouraged (or at least did not hamper) their interests in wayang performance. None had an easy path and all of their experiences are unique, sometimes marked by unusual creative journeys or by personal tragedies and economic necessity. Another factor that helped some of them is the availability of pedalangan (dalang arts) courses in institutions of higher education. Yet these very institutions play a mixed role in the evolution of tradition, fostering innovation in some areas while strengthening the status quo in others. This institutional analysis is another important contribution of the book. The education granted in universities is never sufficient for traditional artists, and successful dalangs require extensive social capital, which puts women at a disadvantage (pp. 146–7). The pioneering women interviewed here had to navigate complex gendered territories, and the controversies about what and when they could perform illustrate the anxieties of the male-dominated world of Balinese wayang.

The book's contributions to the study of Balinese tradition, wayang kulit training and female dalangs are of obvious interest to specialists in Southeast Asian performance. However, this highly readable book should also appeal to general readers and students with an interest in either Balinese theatre, the pedagogies of tradition or women performers more generally.