Girls in America - Hardcover

Girls in America could be renamed "Girls, Uninterrupted." In over 200 pages of text, editor Carol Cassidy almost never intrudes her voice into these interviews of 29 girls--teenage mothers, athletes, and beauty pageant queens--talking about what it's like to grow up female in modern America. Listening to girls is almost a crusade for Cassidy, a filmmaker who first turned some of these stories into a TV documentary. In her introduction she notes that most of those she interviewed said no one had ever asked them for their opinions before. "What about listening to our daughters," she asks, "to their flowered stories, their barbed insults, their prickly questions, their swollen sobs?"

We hear a little of each in this book's pages. Andrea, in South Carolina, a pageant contestant who just won "Miss Southern Belle," recalls joyous days "wallerin' in the dirt" as a young, pudgy tomboy. Ivon, whose father was abusive to her mother, cries talking about the harmful relationship she finally left, only to have a baby at age sixteen. Taneshia, who lost her mother to cancer and is estranged from her father, finds comfort in double dutch jump roping. "You do it on your own," she says of her favorite sport. "You just do what you feel, what your body wants to do, what your heart wants to do." These girls both fulfill and explode the stereotypes of their age and roles, and teen readers are sure to find comfort--and maybe even inspiration--in their honest stories. --Maria Dolan