Girl Reviews
Our Girl Reviews showscases blogs that discuss how girls are portrayed in and impacted by books, movies, television shows, live performances, museums and exhibits, games, and products.
Feel free to comment and share your thoughts about these reviews. If you would like to submit a review, send us an email with your name, country, and a 250-750 word review discussing how that media, museum exhibit, or product portrays and impacts girls.
Book Review: Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence
Junior Girl Sophie Small reviews Michael Marshall Smith’s Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence, published by Harper Collins in 2017.
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Museum Review: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Junior Girl Libby Serra reviews the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, and talks about Gardner’s life.
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Film Review: Clueless
Junior Girl Jessica Eykel reviews cult classic film, Clueless, and talks about the twenty-year-old film’s portrayals of girlhood.
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Teen Dramas: Dirty Dancing
Teen movies are not a modern idea; they have been around for decades. As with any genre of film the best era is always subjective. However, people tend to choose the decade when they were a teenager as the best,the characters being most relatable. Today, with...
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Book Review: ‘American Street’ is the Next Great American Novel
Program Developer Tiffany Rhoades reviews American Street by Ibi Zoboi, calling it a “must read,” and one of the next great American novels.
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Film Review: All About Eve
Junior Girl Sophie Small reviews the classic film All About Eve and talks about the treatment of girls and women in the media, in the 1950s and in 2018.
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Book Review: Forgotten Country
Associate Editor Sage Daugherty reviews Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung, a novel that delves into sibling relationships and the bonds between sisters.
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Teen Dramas: John Hughes Part 2 – The Girls of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was written by John Hughes and released in 1986. The movie is set in Chicago and is often referred to as a love letter to the city by Hughes. It follows the titular character as he skips school. He fakes an illness in order to have some fun in...
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Girls at the Georgian House in Edinburgh, Scotland
Junior Girl Monique Brough talks about her experience at the Georgian House, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and what girls’ lives might have been like.
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Book Review: A Murder for Her Majesty
Associate Editor Sage Daugherty reviews one of her favorite childhood books, A Murder for Her Majesty by Beth Hilgartner and talks about its heroine’s journey in Elizabethan England.
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Teen Dramas: John Hughes, Part 1 – The Problem with Sixteen Candles
The king of teen movies in the 1980s is without question John Hughes. Between 1984 and 1987 he released six movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful. These are all movies still...
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Film Review: Pan’s Labyrinth
Junior Girl Lydia Henning reviews Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and specifically talks about the girl protagonist in the film, Ofelia.
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Teen Dramas: Riverdale: Chapter Three – Body Double
The TV show Riverdale debuted in 2017, and is based on characters from Archie Comics. The show has a mystery element to it with the murder of Jason Blossom in the first episode. While the characters try to figure out who is responsible they also have their own issues...
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Book Review: 1001 Cranes
Associate Editor Sage Daugherty reviews 1001 Cranes by Naomi Hirahara, about a Japanese-American girl named Angela and her eventful, cultural summer spent with her grandparents in Los Angeles.
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TV Review: Friends
Junior Girl Hannah Kelly revisits one of her favorite TV series, Friends, and talks about the societal and gender role shift pertaining to girls, from the 1990s to today.
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Book Review: The Secret Garden
Junior Girl Sophia Lee talks about one of the beloved books from her childhood, The Secret Garden, and its strong female protagonist, Mary Lennox.
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TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet
*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT* I finished watching (read: binge watching) Santa Clarita Diet this weekend, and had to write about the unsung hero, Abby Hammond. The new Netflix-original series tells the story of Sheila and Joel Hammond, married realtors raising their teenage...
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Film Review: The Shallows
Junior Boy Jake Goforth reviews The Shallows, a horror movie about one girl’s struggle for survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
read moreBook Review: Milly-Molly-Mandy
About ten years ago I was browsing in a bookshop and I came across a book I had long since forgotten about. I couldn’t resist opening it up to see if this modern publication was the same as the book that I remembered from my childhood. The book was Milly-Molly-Mandy...
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Review: Nancy Drew
Back in my school days when we couldn’t order books off the Internet, one way for young students to have access to reading materials outside of the general bookstore or school library in New Zealand was the monthly catalogue Scholastic. Here is where I picked up my...
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