Girls on the Verge
Debutante Dips, Drive-bys, and Other Initiations
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a fascinating look at how young women are coming of age in America, Vendela Vida's Girls on the Verge explores a variety of rituals that girls have adapted or created in order to leave their childhoods behind.
Vida doesn't just observe the rituals, she actively participates in them, going as far as spending a week at UCLA to experience rush--she emerges a Tri-Delt. She also goes to Miami to learn about the "quince" (the Latin American celebration of a girl's fifteenth birthday), to Houston to take part in a debutante ball, to Los Angeles and San Francisco to talk to female gang members, to Salem, Massachusetts, to interview a coven of witches, and to Las Vegas to watch young brides take the plunge--some of them in drive-through wedding chapels. With humor, insight, and illuminating detail, she explores girls' struggles to forge an identity and secure a sense of belonging through various rituals--rituals that they embrace without necessarily understanding the comforts they seek or the repercussions of their often all-too-adult choices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an attempt to investigate the rituals that help American girls develop their adult identities, Vida, a graduate of the Columbia University M.F.A. program, infiltrates a sorority, attends a Wiccan Sabbath and observes Las Vegas drive-through weddings, among other events. Unfortunately, the terms of her study are loosely defined (how does each ritual lead to adulthood? What distinguishes the child from the woman?), and, despite the vast body of work on adolescent behavior and the author's interviews with hundreds of girls, the book lacks sociological rigor. For example, Vida compares debutantes, young brides and gang girls without carefully considering their differences in class and race, presenting them as similar because they all yearn for a stronger sense of community. Given her subjects' age range (13 to 18) and how widely their personal circumstances vary, it is difficult to believe that they are all trying to make a dramatic leap into adulthood. Although the young women she interviews make many surprising and self-aware remarks, Vida tries too hard to portray her subjects as searching for meaning. After describing the significance of a girl's 15th birthday (quinceanera) in Cuban culture, she writes of a teenager who had photos taken but couldn't afford the large traditional party: "This is, after all, a place and an environment where pictures mean more than the truth, where a day in a young woman's life is special because photographs are taken of her various poses." While the segments on each group of girls might work as magazine pieces, taken as a whole, they don't quite coalesce.
