Meet Ivy and Bean, Queerly the Anti-American Girls

This article considers the queer world of Sophie Barrows’s Ivy and Bean series against the normalizing world of the American Girl series. Although both are a series of short chapter books about precocious young girls and their friends, often depicted in moments of play, and both are marketed to a young female readership, the ideologies that underpin the Ivy and Bean books make this new early reader series fundamentally different from and much more transgressive than the American Girl series, especially regarding gender.