Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC of this book that I was provided in exchange for a fair and honest review!

I want to start off by saying that in some ways this review may be a bit unfair for the sheer fact that I was so excited about this book when I started reading it. I don't mean excited in the normal "oh, wow, this book sounds so good" way, either: I mean I was excited about this book's very existence. There is such a tendency to downgrade the teenage girl's experience as frivolous and shallow that I think we've become dismissive: learning that there was a book that was nothing but an outlet for these young, female voices thrilled me!

having said that, there were times during my reading of this book when I was pretty disappointed. This book told the stories I wanted to read: immediately from the jump there were stories reflecting real issues with things like identity, sexuality, race, and religion. It was incredibly powerful to read these heavy complicated thoughts from such young minds. So what disappointed me wasn't the content: it was the writing.

Here, again, I think I'm being unfair: these are teenage writers and, frankly, most of them write much better as teenagers than I ever could have, so I'm aware that the problem is potentially a me problem: I want too much. Even knowing that, though, I can't help but be sad that so many of these essays read like college entrance essays: they cover the introduction and many make huge revelations at the end, but there's no middle. There's no real showing how they got there. That's what I most hungered for and that absence, ultimately, made me wholly unsatisfied.

There were other really predictable issues (namely a ton of overwriting and some weirdly mixed metaphors), but those things are so not even blips. They're easy to ignore and totally normal. The missing middles, though, just weren't easy to ignore for me. I couldn't get over it because it happened in essay after essay. I was excited to read this book because I so desperately wanted to hear these teenage voices: voices speaking for my daughter, her friends, my little cousins. I'm still excited by what Write Now is doing to provide that for young girls and think it's incredibly empowering . . . but for right now I'm left still craving those voices.