TRUTH BOMB: Being a girl freakin’ rocks! But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes you need inspiration, support, and advice to help you find your voice and believe in yourself. Girlish is a fun, feisty, information-packed handbook—part discovery course, part interactive journal—filled with quotes, tips, truth bombs, and profiles of amazing women from all walks of life, from Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Amy Poehler to Malala Yousafzai and Simone Biles. Embracing all the beauty, chaos, hope, and frustration of being a girl in the twenty‑first century, Girlish explores life topics that include gender equality, body positivity, self-esteem, relationships, friendship, and even dealing with the mixed bag of the internet and social media. Thought-provoking questions dare you to define your values, set goals, dream BIG, and celebrate everything that makes you you. Ready to create, inspire, invent, strive, lead, love—and have some laughs along the way? Read on . . .

A lost literary gem of Hollywood in the 1930s, I Lost My Girlish Laughter is a thinly veiled send-up of the actors, producers, writers, and directors of the Golden Age of the studio system. Madge Lawrence, fresh from New York City, lands a job as the personal secretary to the powerful Hollywood producer Sidney Brand (based on the legendary David O. Selznick). In a series of letters home, Western Union telegrams, office memos, Hollywood gossip newspaper items, and personal journal entries, we get served up the inside scoop on all the shenanigans, romances, backroom deals, and betrayals that go into making a movie. The action revolves around the production of Brand's latest blockbuster, meant to be a star vehicle to introduce his new European bombshell (the real-life Marlene Dietrich). Nevermind that the actress can't act, Brands' negotiations with MGM to get Clark Gable to play the male lead are getting nowhere, and the Broadway play he's bought for the screenplay is reworked so that it is unrecognizable to its author. In this delicious satire of the film business, one is never very far from the truth of what makes Hollywood tick and why we all love it.

The book gives a real-life example of how people view a person who is overweight, especially women, when they expect you to look a certain way for your age and gender. Being female in American culture puts a lot of pressure on girls and adult women to present themselves physically as slim and attractive. In my case, I present my childhood experience of obesity and how it impacted my life and what women around thought about my physical appearance as a way to inform and help people become knowledgeable about the stigma people put on obesity.

***Finalist, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, LGBT Adult Nonfiction category*** ***Award-Winning Finalist, 2018 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest, LGBTQ Non-Fiction category*** An honest, unfiltered memoir about a girl with an unconventional family. “The story everyone wants to hear isn’t the story I want to tell.” Lara Lillibridge grew up with two moms—an experience that shaped and scarred her at the same time. Told from the perspective of “Girl,” Lillibridge’s memoir is the no-holds-barred account of childhood in an atypical household. Personally less concerned with her mother’s sexuality and more with how she fits into a world both disturbed and obsessed with it, Girl finds that, in other people’s eyes, “The most interesting thing about me is not about me at all; it is about my parents.” It won’t be long before readers realize that “unconventional” barely scratches the surface. In the early years, Girl’s feminist mother reluctantly allows her to play with her favorite Barbies while her stepmother refuses to comfort her when she wakes up from nightmares. She goes skinny dipping on family vacations in upstate New York and kisses all the boys at church. Girl and her brother travel four thousand miles—unaccompanied—to visit their father in rural Alaska, where they sleep in a locked cabin without running water, telephone, or electricity. Raised to be a free spirit by norm-defying parents, Girl has to define her own boundaries as she tries to fit into heteronormative suburban life, all while navigating her mother’s expectations, her stepmother’s mental illness, and her father’s serial divorces. Lillibridge bravely tells her own story and offers a unique perspective. At times humorous and pithy while cringe-worthy and heartbreaking at others, Girlish is a human story that challenges readers to reevaluate their own lives and motivations.

59138

Amanda Hardy only wants to fit in at her new school, but she is keeping a big secret, so when she falls for Grant, guarded Amanda finds herself yearning to share with him everything about herself, including her previous life as Andrew.

When you hear a riveting story, does it thrill your heart and stir your soul? Do you hunger for truth and goodness? Do you secretly relate to Belle’s delight in the library in Beauty and the Beast? If so, you may be on your way to being a book girl. Books were always Sarah Clarkson’s delight. Raised in the company of the lively Anne of Green Gables, the brave Pevensie children of Narnia, and the wise Austen heroines, she discovered reading early on as a daily gift, a way of encountering the world in all its wonder. But what she came to realize as an adult was just how powerfully books had shaped her as a woman to live a story within that world, to be a lifelong learner, to grasp hope in struggle, and to create and act with courage. She’s convinced that books can do the same for you. Join Sarah in exploring the reading life as a gift and an adventure, one meant to enrich, broaden, and delight you in each season of your life as a woman. In Book Girl, you’ll discover: how reading can strengthen your spiritual life and deepen your faith, why a journey through classic literature might be just what you need (and where to begin), how stories form your sense of identity, how Sarah’s parents raised her to be a reader—and what you can do to cultivate a love of reading in the growing readers around you, and 20+ annotated book lists, including some old favorites and many new discoveries. Whether you’ve long considered yourself a reader or have dreams of becoming one, Book Girl will draw you into the life-giving journey of becoming a woman who reads and lives well.