Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture ed. by LuElla D’Amico (review)

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. Described as “a targeted, inquisitive study about girls’ series and their sweeping influence on the girls that read them and the culture that produces them,” the collection interrogates American perceptions of gender and the role of series fiction in the development of identity (ix). For the purposes of her collection, D’Amico defines a series as a set of books “targeting girls that feature the same character or characters for more than three books” (x), and the fourteen contributions to the collection span a range of both time and subject. Organized chronologically, the collection begins with Marlowe Daly-Galeano’s chapter “Louisa May Alcott’s Theater of Time”; includes chapters examining series such as the Five Little Peppers, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, American Girl, the Baby-Sitters Club, Fancy Nancy, and Vampire Academy; and concludes with Grace Halden’s examination of Pretty Little Liars. 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.

Megan E. Friddle writes in her chapter that “girls’ books are a creative (and) ideological apparatus for transmitting narratives and social practices—of girlhood and adolescence in particular and of American culture in general” (165). The popularity and reception of girls’ series fiction allows for the interrogation of social norms, particularly gender norms illuminated by various historical contexts, and many of the chapters in this collection address how traditional notions of femininity are challenged or reaffirmed by characters in girls’ literature. Strong female protagonists can be empowering for female readers, as shown in Christine E. Farman’s “Working Girl: The Value of Girl Labor in the Five Little Peppers Book Series” and Paige Gray’s “A Spectacle of Girls: L. Frank Baum, Women Reporters, and the Man Behind the Screen in Early Twentieth-Century America,” though contributors to the collection often temper radical portrayals of femininity by noting both historical and contemporary heteronormative discourses and a lack of racial diversity in popular series fiction. Carolyn Cocca’s chapter, “The Bob-Whites of the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency: Gender, Class, and Race in the Trixie Belden Series, 1948–1986,” looks at the intersections of white privilege and heteronormativity in that series. In “Queering the Katy Series: Disability, Emotion, and Imagination in the Novels of Susan Coolidge,” Eva Lupold not only notes the dialogical tensions of gender in girls’ series but also introduces the potential for queer spaces and intersections of gender, disability, and age in the Katy books. Chapters such as “‘Girl-Sized Views’ of History: Privilege and Political Consciousness in the American Girls Series,” by Mariko Turk, and “Fancy Nancy: Precocious or Precious?,” by Lori Johnson and Lisa Laurier, look at potential effects of consumerism and implications for femininity, as many contemporary girls’ series have developed into franchises that reinforce consumer culture in both their marketing and the content of the literature. Extending conversations of identity and consumerism, Halden discusses adolescent femininity and technology in “Growing Up in the Twenty-First Century: Pretty Little Liars and Their Pretty Little Devices.” Other contributions examine adolescent identity in a multiplicity of forms and historical contexts, providing a complex and detailed view of both American culture and American girlhood.

The influence of series fiction on the development of adolescent identity and the ability of girls’ series to create a sense of community among readers are running themes throughout the collection. D’Amico notes the relationship between series fiction and girlhood in her introduction: “the genre provides a key to unlocking the complexity of American female adolescent identity formation, as it shapes, reflects, and demonstrates social norms and cues, while at the same time reveals how girls respond and react to...