What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold (2017, Carolrhoda Lab TM; 208 pages) When Elana K. Arnold was a little girl there was a nursery rhyme that made her feel smug. The rhyme goes like this: “Sugar and spice and everything nice; That's what girls are made of.” The stuff of girls is meant to be consumed, a yummy sweet treat that melts in your mouth, the rhyme seems to say. But to an adult, the rhyme reads as a warning rather than an assessment, the author tells us. It's an imperative: to be a girl, one must be sweet and delicious, and one must be made entirely of everything nice. What Girls Are Made Of is a book that brings awareness to the fact that girls are not made entirely of sweetness; on the contrary, they are made also of gore, and negatives, and all the functions of a body. The book examines from a fearless point of view the courage and struggle of being a teenage girl in the modern world, and the result is stunning in honesty and depth. With beautiful prose, Elana K. Arnold takes us to all sorts of places to show us what girls are made of: a high-kill animal shelter, an abortion clinic, a bridge to nowhere that adventure seekers bungee jump from, and all the way to Italy, to the sites of classical and religious art, where the main character and narrator of the story, a sixteen year old girl named Nina, learns the sacred tradition of how stories are told via the distortion and pain of a woman’s body through the statues of saints who endured unspeakable torture because of their unquestioning devotion to the divine. The question of what is love perspires along the book. Nina will do anything for the boy she loves, just to prove she's worthy of him, but when he breaks up with her, Nina is lost and wonders what she is made of, what is love made of. After all, Nina's mother informs a fourteen-year-old, “I could stop loving you at anytime,” adding that “No one loves without conditions.” Raw and unflinching, this book is fantastic. Recommended to older teens and mature readers. Find this title in our catalog: What Girls Are Made Of Recommended by: Maite
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