Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day (review)

Given its mission “ To encourage high standards of criticism, scholarship, research, and teaching in children’s literature,” the Children’s Literature Association has always pursued a publishing agenda, beginning with proceedings from the early conferences. From 1985 through 2006, ChLA-sponsored books were published through an affiliation with Scarecrow Press and included the now discontinued Touchstones and Phoenix Award series, as well as the Centennial Studies series and individual general studies titles that remain part of the new publishing program of the Children’s Literature Association series with the University Press of Mississippi. Sara K. Day’s well-written and meticulously organized first book, Reading Like a Girl, is the second title published in this new series and lives up to the ChLA’s goal “to publish innovative, insightful literary criticism” (childlitassn.org).

Day coins the term “narrative intimacy” to analyze the ways in which first-person female narrators in contemporary American young adult fiction draw readers—primarily adolescent women—into an imagined relationship that situates the reader as confidante. She defines narrative intimacy as a rhetorical situation that “draws attention to the ways in which the roles of author, narrator, and reader are all shaped by their positioning in either the real world or a fictional space” (13). Day establishes these concepts as the underlying framework for her study in chapter 1, “‘She Is a Creature Designed for Reading’: Narrative Intimacy and the Adolescent Woman Reader.”

In chapter 2, “‘Opening Myself Like a Book to the Spine’: Disclosure and Discretion in Constructions of Friendship,” Day discusses the “double-edged sword concept as the dominant cultural understanding of adolescent women’s friendships” (34). In disclosing her inner thoughts and feelings—including those she withholds from characters in the novel—the first-person narrator implicitly situates the reader as an intimate friend. Thus “narrative intimacy becomes a lens through which to recognize flaws in the narrator’s relationships with her (fictional) friends—flaws that almost always return to questions of disclosure and discretion” (35). Day traces this pattern in Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon, Natasha Friend’s Perfect, Stephanie Hemphill’s Things Left Unsaid, Siobhan Vivian’s A Little Friendly Advice, Lizabeth Zindel’s The Secret Rites of Social Butterflies, and E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver series, arguing that “each of these novels constructs the role of the reader as friend, even as the construction of this role may draw attention to or deny constructions of disclosure within friendships as difficult or dangerous” (35). The chapter concludes, “The very boundary between fictional narrator and real reader that is blurred by direct address and anticipation of reader’s responses therefore actively reinforces contradictory messages about intimacy” (63).

In chapter 3, “‘He Couldn’t Get Close Enough’: The Exploration and Relegation of Desire,” Day expands the notion of narrative intimacy in female friendships to “the reader as a welcome voyeur” of romantic relationships (76). Examining Judy Blume’s Forever, Dessen’s Someone Like You, Kristen Tracy’s Lost It, Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, and Rachel Cohn’s Cyd Charisse trilogy, Day finds that “even as narrative intimacy offers a location to explore desire and love, it echoes traditional warnings about the potential physical and emotional threats posed by sexual activity and reinforces the ambiguous discourse of readiness surrounding adolescent sex” (90). Day posits that “the narrator-reader relationship is in and of itself a didactic tool that echoes the traditional demands about love and sex faced by adolescent women in contemporary American culture” (99).

The discussion of romance transitions to a discussion of the ramifications of narrative intimacy in books with themes of sexual violation and trauma in chapter 4, “‘She Doesn’t Say a Word’: Violations and Reclamations of Intimacy.” In such texts, Day claims, narrators “primarily treat the reader as a therapist of sorts, relying on the implication of confidentiality in order to reclaim rather...