Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Rickman’s book and research is that “media migration” is a new avenue for young female adolescents. It is an avenue for those seeking to escape harsh, and what they view as unfair, societal limitations. In presenting this avenue, the book paints a different picture than the more typical developmental research focusing on girls’ media use, which focuses more on what is happening and the challenges of changing it (Festl and Quandt 2016; Frison et al. 2016; Symons et al. 2017) rather than focusing on why media is engaged (see Wängqvist and Frisén 2016). Rickman even goes one step further as she argues that the phenomenon she identified is both unnatural and avoidable—society need only (as a first step) look to the three points highlighted in her impressive book.

Journal of Youth and Adolescence

Rickman’s analysis demonstrates that although the girls use social media to escape marginality, their participation in social media reinscribes their exclusion in new ways. Scholars and teachers of feminism, gender, social media, rural youth, and those who work with adolescent girls will find this text valuable.

Women's Studies In Communication

Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration is an engaging read from beginning to end. It addresses the interplay between social media and identity in Midwest rural American teenage girls. Going beyond typical work in this area that focuses on safety, Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration addresses the prodigious impact of social media’s hidden algorithmic elements on self-perception, identity, social justice, and ultimately power.

Karrie G. Karahalios, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens’ Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggle, Aimee Rickman provides much needed depth and insight into how young women in rural America are using social media to redress the marginality they face in their everyday lives as adolescents, as females, as rural, as economically precarious. Rickman captures the fraught and fanciful ways these young women attempt to reorder such marginality through social media. Rickman's richly contextualized understandings of these adolescents' complex struggles for respect, social power, and relevance reveal practices that alternatively remediate as well as reinscribe these adolescents in their marginality. For those interested in social media, youth, gendered social action, and rural America, this book will not disappoint.

Mary P. Sheridan, University of Louisville