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    • Book Lists
      • Debut YA Novels
      • Get Genrefied
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On Expectations of Female Characters: Guest Post by Trish Doller, Author of THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

June 4, 2015 |

Today we have a guest post from Trish Doller, with a piece about why she decided to write her latest release, The Devil You Know. It’s a post about expectations we put on female characters, and why Cadie, the main character in Devil, came from those expectations. 


Bonus: a giveaway, including a signed copy of The Devil You Know and a paperback of Where The Stars Still Shine to one US/Canadian resident. 

I have a confession: I haven’t read any goodreads reviews of The Devil You Know. Because having already written two books, I can probably guess what the bad reviews might say. Cadie is a slut. She is a horrible daughter for not obeying her father. She is selfish. She is too stupid to live. She makes bad decisions. She deserves every terrible thing that happens to her. (You can go look to see if I’m right. I’ll wait here.)

I expect some readers to not like Cadie because the inspiration for her character was all the similar, terrible things readers said about Callie in Where the Stars Still Shine. Those reviews…I read them and it was so painful to see how unsympathetic people can be. Here was a broken, abused girl who was called a slut for the way she coped with her abuse. She was called a bitch for not always being nice to someone who was trying to be a friend. She was accused of being an ungrateful brat for not immediately embracing the good life her father gave her. 

Let me be clear, though…I’m not angry at those reviewers. They brought their own experiences and belief systems to their readings and they’re allowed to have their opinions. But I am pretty sad that we live in a society that makes it okay to call a girl “slut” for having sex or “bitch” for not being nice. I’m sad at how much we pass judgement on things that rub up against our beliefs, rather than practicing empathy.

Arcadia Wells was born from that sadness, a direct reflection of how it made me feel to see the hate heaped on Callie. If readers couldn’t muster sympathy for a brave, broken girl, I was going to give them a character who isn’t asking for their sympathy. If they had no difficulty labeling a girl who had been sexually abused a slut, I was going to give them a character who was unapologetic about her desires.

So I know there are going to be readers who hate Cadie. That’s fine. Because the readers who love her are going to see the girl I see. One who is brave and stupid. Strong and weak. A girl who wants to love and be loved in return. A girl who isn’t seeking permission or forgiveness from anyone but herself. 

I have another confession: I will probably never read any goodreads reviews of The Devil You Know. Because I wrote the girl I wanted the world to meet. She’s here for the sluts and the bitches and the selfish girls who dare to live.

Filed Under: about the girls, female characters, feminism, Guest Post, Uncategorized, unlikable female characters

Positive Girl Friendships in YA: Guest Post by Jessica Spotswood

March 11, 2014 |

Is it rare to see girl friendships portrayed well in YA fiction? I tend to think that’s an area where there are fewer books than there should be and those that do tackle this subject stand out because it’s fairly rare. Today, Jessica Spotswood is here to talk about female friendship in YA, and I think she gets a little to the heart of why it might be a rare thing and why it’s something she fought for in her own work.



Jessica Spotswood is the author of the Cahill Witch Chronicles: BORN WICKED (2012), STAR CURSED (2013), and SISTERS’ FATE (August 2014). She grew up in a tiny, one-stoplight town in Pennsylvania, where she could be found swimming, playing clarinet, memorizing lines for the school play, or – most often – with her nose in a book. Now Jess lives in Washington, DC with her playwright husband and a cuddly cat named Monkey. She can be found drinking tea, teaching writing workshops for teens, or – most often – with her nose in a book. Some things never change.










When Kelly listed a range of possible topics for my guest post, one leapt out at me right away: friendships in YA. It’s a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, because I would be lost without my girl friends, but strong, positive girl friendships feel like a rarity in YA.

To be honest, they were a rarity in my life as a teen, too. There were lots of toxic friendships, the kind marred by gossip and jealousy and competition, whether it was over parts in the school plays or over boys. These kind of mean-girl dynamics tend to be super popular in YA (see: PRETTY LITTLE LIARS and GOSSIP GIRL). Two of my favorite examples of some truly vicious girls are in Courtney Summers’ SOME GIRLS ARE and in Katherine Longshore’s GILT. For less fraught examples, check out the friendships gone wrong between Samantha and Nan in Huntley Fitzpatrick’s MY LIFE NEXT DOOR, or between Cricket and Jules in Leila Howland’s NANTUCKET BLUE. I think girl-on-girl bullying, frenemies, and friend breakups are all important to portray.

It strikes me, though, that the most common girl friendships in YA are sort of token friendships – the best girl friends who recede into the background once the heroine meets the right guy. This is one of my literary pet peeves, possibly because it rings so true to my own high school experience. I was the single girl amidst lots of couples, with girl friends who only made time for me when they needed relationship advice or consolation after breakups. It made me realize early on how often we idealize romantic relationships and focus on them to the exclusion of all else, and it gave me an early feminist horror for making a boy the be-all and end-all of one’s life. I know firsthand that that dynamic is super realistic – but I don’t think it’s emotionally healthy or ideal, and too often it seems to go unquestioned within the text. If most other girls are either rivals or placeholders until our heroines meet the boys of their dreams – what is that saying? 

My editor for the Cahill Witch Chronicles is brilliant, and I take the vast majority of her suggestions. But the issue of Cate’s friends Sachiko Ishida and Rory Elliott was one that I pushed back on. Sachi and Rory are popular, fashionable, gossipy girls and Cate – who’s preoccupied with the need to protect her sisters and keep their magic a secret from the patriarchal Brotherhood – originally dismisses them as nothing but cabbageheads. But – spoiler – she’s wrong. My editor suggested early on that one of them should be after Finn, that it could be more dramatic if they functioned as rivals with Cate in some way. But it was important to me that Cate be wrong in her original estimation, that she misjudges these pretty girls who love bright colors and dresses, who choose to hide their own secrets in plain sight instead of cloistering themselves away and disdaining feminine things. One of my favorite scenes in the entire trilogy is when Cate realizes how fierce and loyal and strong Rory is, and she’s ashamed of how she’s treated her. It was important to me that Cate find true girl friends – women who are generous and clever and talented and funny, who support her and won’t let her face her problems alone – and that she realize their worth. 

I wish more YA books featured strong girl friendships – the kind worth every bit as much to the heroine as a boy, the kind who aren’t shoved off stage or reduced only to giving relationship advice, who fight the monsters or evil government right alongside the heroine. Here are three girl friendships that I think are really, really awesome:

Rose and Lissa from the VAMPIRE ACADEMY series by Richelle Mead: This was the first example that came to mind, maybe because I just saw the movie! This friendship and the shadow-kissed bond between them are really at the heart of the series. Rose has to try to negotiate her romance around her loyalty to Lissa and her professional duty as Lissa’s Guardian. There are elements of jealousy, of negotiating boundaries (especially since she has a psychic bond with Lissa), of figuring out how to define herself away from the friendship. It’s an awesome, complex relationship that’s every bit as important to both girls as their romances.

Karou and Zuzana from the DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE series by Laini Taylor: I just read the novella “Night of Cake & Puppets” and it hit me again how special this friendship is. Karou and Zuzana are fiercely protective of one another. Zuzana knows that Karou is stronger than her in many ways, but she still threatens the jerk who broke her friend’s heart. Karou is off having mad, dangerous adventures, but she still makes time to text Zuzana advice about Mik. Zuzana is Karou’s link back to the everyday, human world; Karou provides the dash of magic Zuzana desperately wants. They balance each other in a really lovely, supportive way.

Kate and Parker from THINGS I CAN’T FORGET by Miranda Kenneally: Kate is a complex girl, which is why she’s one of my favorite protagonists. She has very firm religious convictions that guide her every move, and at the beginning of the book she’s incredibly judgey. She judges Parker, who’s abandoned some of her church’s teachings and whose mom is a lesbian. Parker calls Kate out when she’s being hurtful, but over the course of the book, she becomes someone Kate can go to with frank questions about boys and sex and morality. Friends don’t always agree on the big stuff, but I love how mutually respectful Kate and Parker are.

What about you? I’d love to read about some of your favorite girl friendships in the comments.
***
Jessica Spotswood is the author of the Cahill Witch Chronicles series, including Born Wicked, Star Cursed, and the upcoming conclusion, Sisters’ Fate, available in August. 

Filed Under: about the girls, female characters, female friendship, girls reading, Uncategorized

When We Talk About “Girl Problems”

June 21, 2013 |

My problems might be superficial on a global scale, but they’re real to me. 
— Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard
One of my favorite quotes in YA fiction is the one above. It’s one I’ve thought long and hard about, and part of the reason is that it captures one of the reasons I love realistic YA fiction so much. On the global scale, problems about boyfriends or about parents or even about the “tougher” stuff — drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, and so forth — are fairly superficial. Few of the stories presented in realistic YA make a huge impact globally. They’re in the here and now, but that doesn’t at all discredit their importance and immediacy to the characters who are telling the story.

Amanda Nelson wrote a really great post over at Book Riot recently about her conflicted feelings for Elizabeth Gilbert (most well-known for her Eat, Pray, Love) that struck a chord with some of what I’ve been thinking about lately in regards to YA fiction and more specifically, the problems that girls encounter in YA fiction. It’s a short post, but the heart of it for me was this:

I have CONFLICTED FEELINGS about Elizabeth Gilbert. I read Eat, Pray, Love, and while I thought her actual putting-words-in-sentences-in-nice-and-interesting-ways WRITING was really good, the subject matter was so annoying that I ended up turning my nose up at the book. A wealthy American white lady complaining about…what, exactly? The spirituality-lite? Leaving her husband because she doesn’t want to be married, then spending the rest of the book talking about men? Ergh.
Except I could deal with it, apparently, because I didn’t fling the book away in disgust or even irritation. I finished it, thought about it, talked about it with other readers. Realized that judging the seriousness of someone else’s problems and the sincerity of their spiritual expression was probably a personality flaw of mine. Changed a little–all because of a book I kinda sorta didn’t even like.

What the wealthy white American lady complains about is the heart of the book and the heart of the criticism people have for this particular book. Gilbert’s memoir is about how she was working through the spiritual and personal aspects of a changing relationship that had, at one time, meant a lot to her but now had left her feeling something different. Amanda nails her own biases here in a way that many readers don’t or don’t think about when they approach a book like Gilbert’s — she judged the seriousness of the problems in the book, rather than reading and considering the book on its own merits.

This is where I see a huge link to what many readers do when it comes to YA fiction, particularly realistic fiction about teen girls. Their problems become disposable, collapsable, and easily judged by the reader. Their problems aren’t considered as global or with any heft. They’re seen as silly and it’s almost an insult to even be compared to a teen girl. Because whatever they’re feeling or experiencing isn’t legitimate or worthy of consideration or attention.
This video is a shining example of what I’m getting at. The standout moment for me is what she has to say here:

People don’t wanna be compared to the teenage girl; the teenage girl is hated, teenage girls hate themselves. If you listen to a certain kind of music, or if you express your emotions in a certain kind of way, if you self harm, you write diaries, all those kind of activities are sort of laughed at and ridiculed because they’re associated with being a teenage girl. Even just things like being cripplingly self conscious or overly concerned with our appearance, that’s considered like a teenage girl thing and therefore its ridiculous, it’s stupid, it’s not relevant or legitimate, and you know, what we needed at that age was legitimisation and respect and support but all we got was dismissal and “oh you’re such a teenage girl.

This is precisely what we do when we’re reading about teenage girls as much as when we’re actually interacting with teenage girls. We call their problems — the real, honest, painful, tough things they’re experiencing — “typical girl problems.”

What does that even mean? What’s a typical girl problem? What’s a typical girl? What’s a typical problem? What puts the line between a “typical girl problem” and a book that’s published featuring a male main character going through “typical boy problems?” What’s a “typical boy problem?” And why is it that “typical boy problems” are considered Literary as opposed to throw away, fluff, or otherwise light reading that “just some book about typical girl problems” can be?

I’m not sure I have answers to any of these questions. And I know for a fact that I’ve used lines like “typical girl problems” in my own reviews to describe what’s going on in a character’s life. But the longer I think about it and consider it, the less that line makes sense and the more it sort of frustrates me as someone who not only loves books about “typical girl problems,” but as someone who loves working with teen girls. I think about this in light of what it might mean to be an unlikable/complicated female protagonist in YA and what it means when a girl learns about her own ability to make choices for enjoying her body and sexuality.

Are we scared that by legitimizing the issues girls face that they might learn to like themselves or that they might find themselves valuable and worthwhile despite not having global problems to work through? 

Rather than offer up answers — I can’t — I thought instead it’d be worth looking through some of the common criticisms leveled at books featuring female main characters and why those perceptions are problematic. As Hubbard notes in that quote from Wanderlove — a book about a girl who needs to travel in order to sort out what’s going on in her own personal life and her own relationships — while the problems may be trivial, they’re very real to the character experiencing them. That doesn’t make them less challenging or less important. 

In many ways, it’s that very thing which keeps girls coming back to YA. They’re seeing themselves in the fiction and they’re empathizing and relating to the problems in these stories. These are their stories and their challenges, and for once, they’re finding a place in the world that not only understands them, but accepts them and loves them through it. 

These books remind teen girls they are perfectly capable, lovable, and valuable as they are right now.  

Keep Calm, Keep Silent 

There are so many books about teen girls and silence. About what happens when something terrible happens to a girl and she isn’t invited to speak up about it or when she tries to, she’s brushed off as being just some girl who doesn’t really know what’s going on.

I’ve been thinking about this since I finished Julie Berry’s All the Truth That’s In Me (September). There’s nothing spoiler in saying the book is about what happens when a girl comes back from being kidnapped. She’s lived in a cult/Puritanical-like world, and that world values a girl’s virginity above all else. When the nameless main character is kidnapped but returns home from where she was taken two years later with her tongue removed — a literal statement — no one wants to listen to her. When she wants to go back to school to be educated, she’s met with sexual advances on the part of her teacher. 
The assumption is that when she was kidnapped, she was made unpure. And as an unpure woman, she had no value to society anymore. She’s not entitled to an education. No one wants to hear her speak up and no one will help her meet her own desire to do so. 
Even though the book is set in a historical time frame, what made it standout was that it was so much a reflection of our own world as it is right now. We silence teen girls and belittle whatever their experiences and opinions and insights might be about what’s going on around us. The main character in this book had the answer to a major crime in town, but no one wanted to listen to her. No one wanted to find out why her tongue was cut out because by virtue of her being a teen girl, the town had already metaphorically removed her ability to speak. 

The girl knew what was going on. And part of her motivation for coming back home was to help people understand what happened to her friend. To make sense of a senseless crime. But no one would listen to her. It wasn’t simply that she had no tongue, making her voice impaired — remember, she wanted to go back to school to learn how to communicate — it’s that no one valued her voice enough to want to help her get to that point. Part of it was her perceived impurity, but a bigger part of it was that she was a teen girl. 

Silence has played a role in the lives of girls in YA for a long time. That was the whole premise behind Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. It played a huge role in Colleen Clayton’s novel about sexual assault, What Happens Next. It certainly played a role in Courtney Summers’s Cracked Up to Be. In all four of these cases in particular, that silence revolved around sexual assault or sexual impurity or at least perceived sexual assault or impurity on some level. 

Which is interesting because for whatever reason, sexual assault and rape and the notion of sexual purity are “girl problems.” 

It’s interesting too, how many parents in these stories don’t exist. Whether that’s by design — they aren’t there — or by perception. Whatever the case is, the truth of it is the adults in so many of these stories aren’t there. 

Girl voices aren’t valued. Girl voices are written off as unimportant, and even when it’s clear there is a girl in trouble — a girl who maybe even knows the key to something bigger — she’s seen as a devalued member of her world. She’s troubled and has problems and needs help but no one actually reaches out to her and sees her through it. Or worse, they do but they’re doing so not because they care about her, but rather, because she’s causing a scene or a fuss and needs to be silenced again. 

In many ways, it’s because of the culture of being undervalued, for being seen as not having something worth sharing, that these girls internalize. They don’t choose silence. It’s not a choice at all. 

The Love Triangle


I’m not the biggest fan of love triangles in YA fiction, but they serve a purpose and do reach a number of readers. But responses to love triangles in YA are fascinating and I think speak to what I’m working at here, too. 

Love triangles are about not just the romance — though that plays a valid and important part. They’re about choice. They’re about making choices among people who a girl wants to get to know better and they’re about making choices regarding time and energy. They’re about following one’s heart and one’s mind in pursuing relationships. 

Responses to love triangles? They’re lame or overdone or tired or stupid plot devices. They’re boring because who cares about romance? 

The girl in the story cares about the romance or else she wouldn’t be struggling with which boy or girl she wants to pursue. Just as fairly, the girls and boys reading the story care about the romance. They relate, even if it’s in their own personal fantasies, of having to make a choice between two people who want to be involved with them. 

Do you see that?

A love triangle is, in many ways, where the girl at the center of the story is able to not only make a choice, but she’s making a choice among two pursuers who are interested in HER. Who want to get to know HER. Who care about who SHE is as she is. 

These sorts of responses don’t get leveled at books where there a male at the center of the story, though, quite in the way they are when it is a girl choosing between two romantic partners. Andrew Smith’s Winger features Ryan Dean West, who has a choice between two girls. But the responses to his pursuits aren’t met with nearly the same vitriol a novel which features similar set ups but with a girl choosing between two boys (and here is my bias, since I haven’t read enough YA where a girl is choosing a non-heterosexual partner). It’s not that Ryan Dean is seen as a hot shot who can get all of the ladies — he’s not! — but rather, his pursuit of romance and physical intimacy and enjoyment isn’t met with the cries of boredom or triteness or the phrase “who cares about the romance?” And while the girls in his book get to make a choice too, about whether or not he’s the guy for them, because the book’s in his voice and through his perspective, we don’t get to know what it is that’s driving them or why it matters to them. 

Boys in YA novels are allowed more choice when it comes to pursuing romance. And in many ways, there’s a special novelty granted to stories where the boy pursues romance in the way that when a girl at the center of a YA novel pursues it, she’s judged for doing so and in many ways, the strength and value of her character are determined based on this decision. 

Dismissing the love triangle trope in YA and complaining about how it’s lame and boring undercuts the value of choice, of independence, of romance, of making tough decisions about relationships to pursue and relationships to drop that teen girls do experience. Though the girls in the real world don’t always have two boys seeking their love, they do deal with tough choices similar to these choices. They have to make choices between activities to engage in. Between friendships to hold onto and those to break. Between making choices about the futures that send them down one road or another. The love triangle in YA is both the literal choice among two romantic paths and the metaphorical choice. That sometimes you simply have to make tough decisions between two appealing but different things.

Further reading on the love triangle and why it is valuable can be found on Angie’s blog in relation to Katniss in The Hunger Games titles “Why Team Peeta is a Feminist Statement” and on S. E. Sinkhorn’s post “Love Triangles: Why? – A List.”  

The Every Girl


There was a really interesting comment last year over at the Someday My Printz Will Come blog about the Sarah Dessen formula. And it’s a comment that’s appeared in more than one review of a Dessen book. While I definitely agree there is something formulaic in Dessen’s writing — all of her stories feature an average girl dealing with challenges of balancing family, self, romance, and friendship — the writing is always top notch. But more importantly . . . 


All of her stories feature an average girl dealing with the challenges of balancing family, self, romance, and friendship. 

The Dessen girl is the every girl. She is, if you will, often much like Elizabeth Gilbert. She is worried about her own life and the tough things she’s going through at the time. Yes, this often revolves around a boy. Sometimes it revolves around a good friend. Sometimes it revolves around a family that’s not necessarily 100% whole and intact. 

The Moon and More debuted at #3 on the New York Times best sellers list. Dessen isn’t a stranger to this list, and her books are among the first associated with realistic fiction. She’s been around for a long time, and her books are always highly anticipated when they come out every couple of years. Readers love Dessen because they know what to expect of her stories: a girl working through her life’s challenges, with the hope and promise of a satisfying, honest, and real ending. There’s also hope for a little romance and an adventure or two — however small — along the way.

Dessen writes books that readers relate to because they’re their stories. And in many ways, Dessen’s books are criticized for that very thing: for being formulaic and for being predictable. But the truth is, that’s the bulk of a teen girl’s life — it’s formulaic and predictable. That is not a slight on teen girls but rather, a window into the truth of what their every day experiences are. They find themselves drawn to stories like Dessen’s or Susane Colasanti’s or Deb Caletti’s or Jessi Kirby’s or other similar writers because they understand these girls because they are these girls. 
They’re finding authors who completely understand them, but more than that, who want to tell their stories. These authors respect and cherish teen girls and do so by illuminating their worlds in ways that readers (and I don’t leave out boys here!) completely understand because they are living these stories every single day. Contemporary YA authors do this in their work, but there’s something even more intimate and personal about the authors who are so focused on these stories about girls working through their every day challenges. 
The characters in these books? They’re living the problems their readers are. And these books respect that. These are not grand, end-of-the-world problems. They’re real world problems. Today’s teen girls are told over and over their problems don’t matter. They’re trivial. They’re not global.  
But these same teens are buying these books and caring about these stories because they’re finding here that their problems DO matter somewhere.

What’s Scary For Teen Girls To Know?


In 2006, John Green’s Looking for Alaska won the Printz Award. It’s a book which features an oral sex scene. The book is considered literary despite that.

I talked at length about female sexuality in YA already and the positive, empowering portrayals of it in recent titles. But in many ways, I think that when we think about positive female sexuality in YA, it’s not given the same sort of merit or time or praise. Much of it has to do with the greater book, of course, which leads back to the idea that stories about girls, with girls at the center, aren’t received with the same seriousness and merit as literary as those with boys at the center. Yes, Looking for Alaska was primarily about Alaska. But it was about Alaska through the eyes of Miles. 

Coming back to this particular topic in YA is important because I spent a long time reading and considering the comments about my own post over at Dear Author. I wonder if it’s true that a sex scene as mild and implied — not explicit but implied — as the one noted in Doller’s book really and truly wouldn’t fly in some of the public and school libraries as suggested. 
Do these libraries not have Looking for Alaska on shelf? 

I think we come back to the same thing — when a girl is at the helm, the perceptions of what a book is or isn’t about comes through. A girl exploring and being positive about her sexuality is considered too much for some libraries, but a book about a boy doing the same thing is par for the course. It’s, in fact, literary, where the book about the girl is considered more disposable. And sure, there are books where girls who are sexually active or experience positive sexuality which merit the label literary. But I think there is a much quicker knee-jerk reaction to what a book is or is not when it is a girl having these experiences. When it’s a boy, it’s just a boy being a boy.

Are girls’ stories frivolous? Are they worth less than a story about a boy?
Is it scary to think about a girl who is in control of her life, her story, or her experiences, physically, mentally, and emotionally? Why do we bristle at a girl experiences? Why do we devalue it? Why is there a belief that sexual moments in YA books that are through a female main character are there as means of titillation? 
Of course, we know that Green’s book has been challenged. But I think there’s a difference between a book being challenged because it’s made it to the shelves and a book that never gets a chance because it’s not seen as worth the expense. 

So . . . what?


I don’t have any answers, but I have a lot more questions. 

We see girl problems in stories, and we call them out as much.

We dismiss girls’ feelings and experiences as “typical girl problems” and I think we often do it in a way that makes these palatable. But they’re palatable not to girls through this sort of language, but instead, they’re dismissed as a means of making the story palatable to boys. 

Think about the books — realistic, in particular — featuring amazing male lead characters. Whether the book is written by a male or female, those boys are noted for having memorable and strong voices, often because they are boys. This is something someone pointed out to me in my own reviews and discussion of memorable voice. I’ve fallen into calling a voice memorable on the basis that the voice is a male’s. Even when I am conscious of my own thoughts on characters, on gender, and on avoiding conflating either or both of them, I find myself coding them together. This isn’t something I tend to do when talking about a girl main character’s voice.

Is it because I, too, have silenced her voice in my own reading?

Or is it because I’m trying to making statement about the palatability and the importance of problems in these stories, even though it’s far from intention on my part to do so? 

Many times I think we go much easier on our male main characters than our female ones. We don’t have an easily-created “unlikable male characters” book list. We forgive tragic back story much easier (note that male characters don’t often have a back story where they were a victim of rape, sexual assault, or sexual abuse — big, heavy, hard-to-take female back stories that are so often dismissed as “tragic” or “easy” or “lazy” back story). I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about those books about boy main characters — those I’ve loved, especially — and wonder what the reactions would be toward the behaviors and stories would be if it were instead a female main character. Would they be memorable? Or would they be disposable? Or would they face harder challenges? Or would it be easier? 

There is a lot here, and there is a lot more I can’t say because I don’t have the words to sort through my thoughts on this topic. But I keep going back to the Hubbard quote, and I keep coming back to what Nelson notes in her post about Elizabeth Gilbert. 

Despite many of the books being about “girl problems,” there’s no such thing as “girl problems.” These are people problems. And if we keep devaluing people problems by calling them “girl problems” or “typical girl problems,” we inherently devalue the girl. We keep her silenced. We keep her from making choices and pursuing her destiny on her own terms. We make her an every girl. And we keep her scared that she’s always going to be just a teenage girl.

Filed Under: female characters, feminism, Uncategorized, Young Adult

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