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!

"I would have liked the movie immeasurably better if, instead of being about a beautiful, smart virgin who acquired an unearned reputation and then cleared her name and bagged the super-nice boyfriend, it was a movie about a girl who actually had extremely hot sex with her queer best friend and then fcked a bunch nerds for Home Depot gift cards and was still presented as a sympathetic protagonist."

If you havent read Abandon Me by Melissa Febos, it is one of my all time favorite memoirs. Ever. I love it so much and I think you should go, immediately and read it. Girlhood was brilliant. It's a stunning, real glimpse into the difficult navigation and trappings of being a girl, evolving as a girl, the situations we find ourselves in and how we carry them with us at times unbeknownst to ourselves. 

"When I think about healing in the abstract, I imagine a closing-up, or a lifting-up. In my fantasies, healing comes like a plane to pull me out of water. Real healing is the opposite of that. It is an opening. It is dropping down into the lost parts of yourself to reclaim them. It is slow, and there is no shortcut. Sometimes what I mean by healing is changing. A lasting, conscientious change in the self is similar to one in society; it requires consistent tending. It is sometimes painful and often tedious. We must choose it over and over."

"You can simply say, 'I'm done,' or, 'This isn't working,' he told us. As he spoke, I felt my eyes prickle with tears. What a simple and gorgeous idea that was. I thought of myself as a Girl and as a Younger Woman-with all those boys and men and even women who I had never wanted to touch me. I thought of all the women whose stories I now carried in me. What if we had all been taught that we could walk away whenever we wanted? What if we had learned that saying no was a Necessary way of taking care of ourselves?"

I can't wait for this book to release so I can haul a copy and mark it all up with my favorite orange highlighter, hearts, smiles and WTFs..because there are plenty in this book. Melissa Febos is the cheerleader all girls have needed at some point. Girlhood is brutal but can also be confusing as it is also one of the best times in your life, this book is such a must read!

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...................................................................................................

It's difficult to be a girl. There are stereotypes, conventional paradigms, and social pressure galore. Febos duscusses ,in her collection of essays, her experiences navigating girlhood. I found the parts where she is labeled in junior high and how people went along  with it to be truthful. People can be vile and as long as it's not them being the object of the ridicule, they tend to go along with it. In some of her other essays, it was a challenge to relate as her experiences and lifestyle. Girlhood to be forthright and blunt and will likely resonate with a broad spectrum of readers.

Excellently written  This has such a narrative tone that doesn't read like "typical" essays.  I felt like I was listening to a story most of the way through, and one that I could identify with in many ways.

Love Melissa Febos so much, I love that she expanded beyond herself in this collection and managed to continue with the breadth of a long essay.

I read Febos' earlier memoir, Whip Smart, a few years ago, and you can really see the way her lens has expanded here. Girlhood is sharp and compelling about what it's like to exist in the world as a girl and then a woman. This is memoir mixed with a bit of philosophical nonfiction in essay form, and the book really works as a related whole.

Febos is an incredible writer. Her prose is so energetic, visceral and always a treat. However, some stories in "Girlhood" felt familiar from her previous work, and the minimalist illustrations (very Rupi Kaur-ish) didn't really add much for me.  I do love her blend of personal stories and psychology, particularly in The Mirror Test, and as always, Febos writes amazingly about sex. She definitely unpacks the trials of sexuality from a young girl's perspective.  She also often brings in historical perspective. However, I would much sooner recommend '"Abandon Me," which was more gripping for me personally.

Beautiful and heartbreaking close look at gender, identity and girlhood. A must read for everyone seeking to understand their place in the world.

As I read this new collection of essays by Melissa Febos, I wondered, with each successive essay, how my own transition to adulthood might have been different had I read this as a teenager, or better yet, discussed its themes with my mother, or my father, or if excerpts of this had been discussed as part of our high school's sex ed. classes. These chapters felt decidedly more essay than memoir; we get Berger and Lacan and Foucault as well as Febos' usual exploration of Greek mythology. However, they are all grounded in Febos' own experience as a girl coming of age on Cape Cod, the emotional tenor of which she excavates so honestly and unflinchingly, it impossible not to read and reflect on my own awkward, yearning, insecure teenage self with perhaps as much compassion I've ever given her. 

Of particular note is Febos' discussion of "empty consent" in the essay "Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself" which centers the way women acquiesce to men's desires w/o first considering their own wants. This is, I think, what the viral New Yorker story "Cat Person" was getting at (and why it went viral) and Febos' clear and incisive take is very worthwhile. I found myself almost screaming "yes! yes!" while I read. Additionally of note are the essays, "The Mirror Test," which explores the term "slut" and how we often come to see ourselves as others insist that we are, and, "Thesmorphia," which considers Febos' relationship with her mother.

What is so strong about this collection is, in my opinion, that it explains so much of what was unspoken throughout my own "girlhood" (cough: masturbation, emphasis on knowing how to give a blow job but not knowing how to ask a man to pleasure me, slut shaming, body shaming, the expectation that I be fully desirable but also fully unattainable and also completely responsible for that precarious balance), BUT in a way that is contextualized, intellectualized and also completely centered in Febos's own experience, making her as the writer on the page feel both wise and friendly.

I highly recommend this book for literally everyone. I loved it.

As a mother to three girls I was really eager to dig into this book, and it did not disappoint. An ambitious book, it dives deep into the social conditioning of girls, with personal anecdotes, research and news stories. It certainly isn’t an easy read, but it is an important one

Melissa Febos' latest essay collection is moving and lovely. She bolsters her anecdotes by also providing relevant research and news stories. The illustrations are a nice touch, too.

I had to give myself a few days to even write this review, as the reading experience was so powerful for me. I've read many many books in the long essay, memoir mixed with non-fiction and philosophy genre, and this is one of the best. I'm going to buy it for at least 5 of my friends as soon as it's available. Wow. 

This book was so deeply moving, and intellectually energizing. I feel like it needs at least three or four reads for me to grasp the full depth of every connection Melissa Febos made throughout the book. This book proves the maxim that what is most personal is most universal. Though our backgrounds are quite different, many of the lines Febos wrote felt as if they came from my journal. 

This should be a must read for all people who have ever identified as femme or female. Endless gratitude for Melissa Febos for writing this phenomenal and important book.

This book was fantastic and would be a fantastic inclusion in any CNF MFA class. Specifically, I really enjoyed the wide scope of the topic covered in each essay. This would also be really interesting to read juxtaposed to Abandon Me, Febos really outdid herself with this book and I would be surprised if anyone didn't like it.

Wow, this was difficult to read - because it was so honest and heartbreaking and REAL. The way Febos fearlessly faces the social conditioning and resulting internal loathing and external danger that many American girls live with (many without acknowledging or even KNOWING) is powerful, and I had to keep putting the book down to take a break because it was so overwhelming and DARK.

My favorite essay was the last one, where she visits France as an adult on a path of recovery and reclaiming of herself, and compares it to her first visit to France as a very young adult caught in the throes of addiction, anguish and loneliness. Both of the tales intertwined in that essay were so vivid and powerful for different reasons, and it was a great way to end the book.

Absolutely enjoyed this compilation of essays that incorporates girlhood, LGBTQ and minority issues.

Loved this book! Melissa Febos is a literary genius and nails the binds that women are so often caught in and taught to live within. I really enjoy her style of writing and relate to her frustration around how females are forced to quiet their voices to benefit men and fit into cultural expectations.