Part of the Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series, LuElla D’Amico’s collection aims to open up spaces for further academic work that both validates girls’ reading experiences and critically analyzes historical and contemporary girls’ series…. Common themes of identity, community, and femininity are woven throughout the chapters, as authors illuminate the historic evolution of American girlhood through the examination of popular girls’ series fiction…. These chapters note the possibilities and real-world implications for girls’ series fiction, enforcing the significance of both this collection and the wider field of girlhood studies…. D’Amico has provided the necessary addition to critical analyses looking at American history, popular culture, and feminism that not only celebrates the experiences of many girl readers throughout history but also critically interrogates the ways in which series fiction has both reflected and shaped American culture and American girlhood.

Children's Literature Association Quarterly

What distinguishes this group of essays from previous similar studies, which are still rare, is the way that the essays converse with each other in unexpected ways. Not only do the readings here illuminate some unexplored or unstudied works, but D’Amico has included a dynamic and diverse breadth of authors and focuses, allowing for the similarities and complications between seemingly disparate works in this genre to bounce off of each other—the mark of a good collection and skillful editor.

The Lion and the Unicorn

This well-researched volume provides an insightful and informative look into a part of the history of girls’ series in American popular culture. It is well-structured and organised to help the reader understand the subject. This book has much to recommend it to its readers, especially teachers and students who want to inform themselves about series for young girls and boys, and the messages they provide. What adds to the success of this book is that it covers a wide range of girls’ series and offers a look into the progress of women’s rights, as well as a view into the popular culture of the last century. This volume also manages to connect characters from different series and draw comparisons between them, which contributes to developing a new and educational perspective on girls’ series.

Libri & Liberi

The purpose of an edited collection is rarely to delve deeply into a subject, but rather to function as a series of introductions, showcasing breadth and variety. This is a key strength of Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture that promises to deliver ‘as comprehensive a historical and critical approach as possible’ (xvi). Edited collections can struggle with cohesion, but the essays in this one helpfully outline connections between the essays, creating a homogeneity that is often absent from such work. . . for folkloristics invested in the intersection of culture and identity, this book, which pays close attention to questions of genre, motif, and change over time, is a welcome addition to the field.

Folklore

Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture is an impressive and wide-ranging collection, quite equal to the task of analyzing many of the series that have influenced American girls and young women for more than a century. D’Amico’s introduction delineates the ways in which girl culture has long been influenced by series fiction and how young women have long negotiated social codes and constrictions through these novels. From studies of Alcott’s little women, to Keene’s young detectives to Shepard’s little liars, these original essays make deeply informative contributions with their well-theorized readings that offer relevant connections to each other and to American popular culture, including third-wave feminism, social media, and surveillance.

Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta-Augustana

By drawing critical attention to the perennially popular but much-maligned genre of girls’ series books, this collection, delivered in accessible prose, contributes meaningfully to the growing fields of girlhood and childhood studies. Challenging the common assumptions that girls’ series novels are formulaic and fundamentally conservative in their representations of gender and coming-of-age, this collection offers an expansive genealogy of a tradition that has shaped the lives of generations of girls and women. By bringing together narratives from the genre’s nineteenth-century inception, like the Little Women trilogy, with popular contemporary texts, like Pretty Little Liars and the American Girl books, this collection opens up a conversation about the ways the girl culture of the past continues to shape girlhood in the present.

Allison Speicher, author of Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction