I couldn't get through this title. It ended up not being for me, but I hope it finds a hope with other readers.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Girlhood by Melissa Febos was incredible. The writing is so heartwrenching, honest, raw, authentic and incredibly sad and universal if you're a girl, woman, mother, sister, etc. From the very first chapter, I was hooked immediately and it saddened me to share so many experiences and truths with the author. Highly recommend reading and giving it to a friend to bask in the glory of all that is Melissa Febos.

Melissa Febos has a way of writing that simultaneously feels like a knife in your heart and the sweetest embrace. I don't know how she does it. This book will make you reevaluate everything you thought you knew about the world and your place in it.

I really enjoyed this feminist memoir. Mostly lived experiences as a woman from the authors life, she also weaves other women's experiences from interviews, and research from herself and other feminist researchers. At times the chapters felt a little disjointed but that is a really picky criticism of a really phenomenal collection of essays. Thanks to netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beautiful beautiful collection of essays that is simply hard to put down. I read this author's work for the first time, and I will definitely be checking out her previous books too. Its a lyrical picture portraying the life of women, what constitutes their life and how unbalanced the world is in their favour even today. A must read for everyone in general! Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

These stories were inspirational and relatable. I feel that this book could be used for future generations of young girls as well.

The way these essays circle around various touch points, acknowledging first and then returning, pulling all the threads together like a loom, is brilliant.

This is a special book. I will certainly use excerpts in my classroom. It is powerful and unique. It is fresh.

“Girlhood” is a queer feminist memoir. It’s also a cultural study on how girls and women use their bodies to gain power, to fit in and to escape. And it’s a coming of age story about worth, trauma, boundaries, consent, shame, and perception.

Melissa Febos is a force who reclaims her sense of self. Even if it takes a few decades and countless hours in therapy. She teaches us that it's okay to recover out loud and how to accept ourselves and our transgressions. After reading this book, I realize that I'm not nearly as broken as I think I am. And I can forgive the girl that I once was.

Special thanks to Bloomsbury for access to the e-galley via NetGalley. This is my honest review.

This was my first time reading Melissa Febos' work, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about her essay collection since putting it down. I desperately wanted to read through this in one sitting but made myself pause as it felt each story required immense space to breathe and impact the reader. I will be recommending this to everyone I know this summer.

GIRLHOOD by Melissa Febos is a collection of essays by an award-winning author. Booklist gave this much anticipated title a starred review and Publishers Weekly described it as a "dark coming-of-age story [that] impresses at every turn." Sadly, for me, it was just too dark and I am therefore giving it a neutral rating of three.

I don’t even know how to talk about this book. It was brilliant and beautiful, but hard to read because of how much it seemed to reach into me. I will say I struggled with the first couple of essays in here. I wasn’t sure I would click with Melissa Febos’ writing style. I wasn’t sure the material was something I necessarily wanted to get into. But, this book got stronger and stronger the more it went on. I can’t deny how much it began to grip me.

Febos captures vulnerability in a very specific, yet undeniably understandable way. This book was a challenging reading experience for me, because it felt like I was being slapped in every essay I read. I mean, it was emotionally jarring how acutely Febos describes particular experiences, particular feelings. With “Intrusions” and “Thank You For Taking Care of Yourself” especially, I was just astonished at the way she is able to describe such a singular yet constantly present overlapping of emotions and thoughts, pushes and pulls. Febos writes of her own interior life so boldly that it reached into mine and woke me up in a way.

As long as it took me to actually make my way through all of the essays, I was also constantly thinking about and talking about this book. These essays made me confront some experiences of my own that I would rather have not thought about, but ultimately I’m grateful that I did. I’m grateful to know I am not alone in them. And Febos’ vocalization of her experiences, her creation of something as concise as an essay, helped me begin to vocalize my own and lean into ways I can create something from my secrets too.

I am so happy to have read this and to have read it all the way through. There were many times I wanted to give up, because it was too hard and too uncomfortable. But, ultimately there is so much warmth here in addition to all of that big, scary emotion. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but reading this felt like a really tough therapy session. And, I’d like to book another appointment. Great read, will definitely be keeping my on Febos and looking to read more from her.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for an e-arc!

What does it mean to be female? This book explores that question in so many unique and compelling ways. I'll be gifting this widely.

Girlhood is another standout essay collection by Melissa Febos. I'm in awe of this book's unflinching reflection on the violent atmosphere girls are raised in, especially those of us who developed early and received sexual attention too young to escape it. Febos uses interviews, literature and film, as well as personal experiences, to unpack the challenging nuances of consent, power and our relationship to our bodies. My favorite essays traced the origin of the word "slut" and what it means to be a woman deemed *bad*, and a chilling look at the normalization of "peeping Toms" and the terror of being stalked in your own home. I want to reread her essay about "empty consent" once I've had some time to digest it: she unpacks how women negotiate sexual encounters they don't want in order to survive unscathed, and our lack of language to understand and describe experiences that don't leave us traumatized but are nonetheless assault or violations. Melissa Febos's intelligence, curiosity and talent drips from each page. This is an essay collection to return to again and again.

I've long appreciated Melissa Febos's writing, and this book certainly lived up to my expectations. A few of the essays have previously been published elsewhere, though I believe some may have been expanded here, and I appreciated seeing them in a new/broader context. I would certainly teach some of these essays to creative writing students or upper-level undergrads in an essay/non-fiction class.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for this advanced reader copy!

Girlhood by Melissa Febos centers on coming of age into girlhood. For many of us women, we remember ‘girlhood’ as those awkward years, typically around middle school times, where we still feel young, innocent, and vulnerable, but have begun to be sexualized by others. The book contains a mixture of her own experience, psychology of aging, literary references, and current cultural examples. This book is important and timely and I would encourage people, especially men, to read this. My only critique is that sometimes it jumped around and it would take me a minute to acclimate to the next section of writing.

Girlhood by Melissa Febos is an important book that is focused on coming of age into girlhood - that awkward time of feeling young and innocent, yet becoming sexualized in the eyes of others. The author does an excellent job at integrating real life examples, her own and those of the women she interviewed, with psychology, pop culture, and literature. My only reason for not giving this book a higher rating is that while the narrative is unified by theme within each essay, the author jumps around a lot with their examples, which for me made it harder to connect with the book and I often found myself having to reread a few sentences each time that happened.
3.5 stars

Advanced copy provided courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Content warning: sexuality, nonconsensual sexual contact and rape, sexual harassment and assault, sexualization of pubescent girls

I loved this book! What a powerful and heartbreaking collection.

Growing up is hard, puberty is weird. I hope girls coming of age now have more outlets to talk, learn, and explore their own wants, desires and questions.

Enjoyed reading about the author's own experience as a girl and growing into a woman, felt like I was having a (very smart!) conversation with a friend!

Melissa Febos's work is truly a work of art, and after Abandon Me I feel anything is hard to live up to the hype. However, Girlhood is certainly a contender as a powerful exploration of female culture. How does the body affect others' views of a young girl? How does it change the perception of her value?

These questions and more are raised in Febos's new work, and for any gender it is a contemplative, insightful look into the female world; it dares to ask us if we feel this world should exist or if we should simply create our own.

Amazing and powerful look into a woman's journey. Compelling and raw...................................................................................................