Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity draws on interdisciplinary theorisations of ‘voice’ to celebrate the lives of female singers from around the world. Through 10 ethnographic case studies, it attempts a synthesis of literary and literal conceptions of vocality, situating the metaphorical voice within the embodied voice of everyday life. In doing so, it addresses issues of individual subjectivity, agency and representation. Recognising that the voice has been a useful point of departure for women-focused scholarship, the volume is broadly in line with the project of relocating women's quotidian life experiences as an equal focus of scholarly canons, and of examining women's agency or resistance in spaces where it may have been overlooked or misunderstood.

Each chapter is written by one author – mostly ethnomusicologists – and focuses on one woman whose life is deeply affected by her experiences as a singer. The authors use a creative biographical method to explore the mutually informing nature of voice and identity, allowing life stories to organically touch on themes of risk, choice, opportunity, success and struggle. Widely varied by musical genre (traditional, devotional, rap, jazz, folk and classical) and geography (Japan, Cuba, Turkey, Mexico, USA, Cyprus, Torres Straight Islands, Australia, Poland, Canada, South Africa, Iran and Afghanistan), the essays consider the act of singing across local, translocal and global domains, often drawing on years-long relationships between scholar and singer. While not using standard musicological analysis (with the exception of Thomas Solomon's chapter on Turkish rapper Ayben), the authors do expound on each singer's vocal quality, style and performance techniques, seeking relationships between the sound of the voice and its metaphorical and biographical correlates.

To offer a few examples, Nicoletta Demetriou contributes a chapter about Cypriot singer Kyriakou Pelagia, who – after spending much of her adult life as a dedicated housewife, mother and grandmother – rose to national stardom in the art of tsiattista, a traditional singing style typically practised by men. Despite this success, Pelagia frequently insisted, ‘I'm a housewife, not a singer’. The reader comes to understand Pelagia through the choices she makes: her commitment to her husband, her navigation of social taboos against female singers, her engagement with young fans and new pop musics, her embracing of some opportunities and rejection of others.

Gay Breyley discusses the life of Sima Shokrani, an Iranian singer who draws on the songs of her grandmother to engage in political activism and to share women's perspectives on romance, agency, work and commitment to community. Breyley illustrates how Shokrani adapts her performances to adhere to context-specific Iranian laws on women singers, and uses music to explore and redefine female strength and emotion.

Katelyn Barney writes about Lexine Solomon, an Indigenous Torres Strait Islander who lives on mainland Australia. Solomon uses her songs to empower women, to speak out about the marginalisation of Torres Strait Islanders, and to document her own family history. Barney emphasises how Solomon uses song to structure and maintain her sense of self and her connections to family and homeland. More broadly, Solomon's singing is a means of advocating for women and indigenous people.

Collectively, the chapters avoid the theoretical or topical boundaries that often structure discussions of gender and music. Rather, the authors attempt to fluidly trace each singer's navigation across private and public domains, professional and personal responsibilities, conventional and innovative aesthetic choices and traditional and transgressive gender roles. Consequently, our attention is focused on the multiple and sometimes conflicting identities that each women negotiates throughout her musical experiences, particularly across different life stages.

As with most edited volumes, the overarching theoretical framework is laid out primarily in the Introduction, where editor Ruth Hellier (who also contributes a chapter) acknowledges debts to poststructuralist, feminist and ethnomusicological scholarship. Hellier is careful to point out that her theoretical framework is not meant to define the boundaries of her contributors' work; instead, she notes, insights from poststructural and feminist thought caution her against laying out a totalising narrative for her volume. This is in part a response to the objectifying nature of theorising the individual, and an effort to allow the life experiences of informants to drive each narrative. However, Hellier notes, the chapters can be thought of as examining ‘how a singing voice enables voice as power to be enacted’ (p. 5). A specific concern with women's vocality underlies each chapter, but the volume makes a departure from common discourses of women's restriction and oppression by emphasising success and pleasure. Still, this attention to agency is not overdrawn; rather, there is a balanced focus on the choices that women make within complicated and shifting social, political and familial contexts.

There are three other features of Women Singers in Global Contexts that deserve special notice. One is a thoughtful afterward by Ellen Koskoff, a two-part discussion that first considers several themes that coalesce the volume, and then playfully plays devil's advocate by critiquing theme-seeking for its hindering of creativity and silencing of voices. Throughout, Koskoff offers a well-supported reflection on the lessons of feminism as they manifest both in the everyday and in the act of ethnographic writing. In doing so she reveals some of the complications that underlie feminist ethnography, and commends the current volume for its handling of these challenges.

Secondly, the book has an appendix that is organised according to eight themes: vocal aesthetics and self-crafting; bodies and clothes; journeys and migration; and risks, tensions, opportunities and activism, to name a few. The appendix offers a summary of every theme as it is related to each of the 10 singers. This will be an interesting resource for researchers who desire easy access to organised ethnographic data. It may also be a tool for teaching undergraduate students to extrapolate themes across resources.

Finally, the book has a well-organised website that gives readers access to audio and/or video recordings of each singer.

While individual chapters of this collection will be useful as excerpts for researchers and students, what is truly notable about the book is the sum of its parts. Reading 10 side-by-side examples of how singing is interwoven into the lives of women – some famous, some not – reveals how music can underlie a constant negotiation of choices, both mundane and extraordinary.