Posts filed under 'books'
Or is it Bridget Jones's Diary: The Early Years?
The Candy Apple children’s book series has titles like How to be a Girly Girl in Just Ten Days, Miss Popularity, and The Boy Next Door. In combination with these titles, the books’ hot pink covers and cutesy cartoon images draw in young readers. Candy Apple books are developed on the theory that clothes, makeup, and boyfriends are the primary concerns for tweenage girls.
According to a teachers’ web site, Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard, the books are at a third-grade reading level and are aimed at readers grades three through five. These books are marketed to girls as young as seven!
While reading the book How to be a Girly Girl in Just Ten Days, I felt like I was reading Bridget Jones’s Diary: the Early Years. Each chapter starts with a horoscope or advice on dating that could have been taken from any real magazine aimed at teen girls. Some of the magazine-type blurbs have titles like; “QUIZ: What does he really think of you?” “First Date DOs and DON’Ts,” and “From Friend Boy to Boyfriend — Turn Your Pal into Prince Charming by This Weekend!”
In the book, the eleven-year-old main character, Nick, struggles with her appearance and attracting boys until the end, when she settles back into her old style (basketball jerseys and no makeup). Of course, she also gets the boy of her dreams in the end. The basic plot of the main character eventually being content with her original sporty clothes is truly fantastic. However, there are 138 pages (out of the 163) that excitedly outline makeover tips and discuss how fabulous Nick looks post-makeover.
Although the book is trying to make the point that you are fine just the way you are, the message is weakened by the glamour of Nick’s makeover. The author of this book and others in the Candy Apple series take on topics that are potentially pertinent to the target age (i.e. being comfortable with your own style) but execute it in a way that dilutes the positive objective. The issue of feeling pressure to look a certain way is not addressed so that most third and fourth graders can understand it.
Girls in the target age group for these books pick up stories with slightly older characters — in this case, Nick (age 11) — to feel more mature. When reading about these characters shopping for makeup, something the readers probably don’t do yet, they are less likely to see the subtleties of Nick’s turn-around. Books like this one, in spite of their good intentions, can help push young girls into a world that revolves around physical appearance.
If you have kids or work with them, one way to fight these messages is by talking with the kids while they are reading the books. Ask them questions to get them thinking about the things they are reading.
Do you want to give tips on how these story lines might be better executed? You can contact Scholastic Inc. through their web site by clicking here.
– Ashley
April 29th, 2009
Recently we came across an honest, enlightening account of a mother and daughter’s experience with eating disorders, and we thought you should know about it. Distorted, a book by Lorri Antosz Benson and her daughter Taryn Leigh Benson, chronicles the experiences they respectively shared while Taryn was battling eating disorders as a teenager.
Distorted is an honest and holistic account of what happens when a loved one is struggling with a disease. I’m keen on emphasizing the word disease because this was the first time I deeply understood the fact that an eating disorder is a disease. It may play out differently than alcoholism, but the common link is that both alcoholics and people with eating disorders are consumed by their addiction.
The book is made up of journal entries submitted by the mother and daughter as they live through their experiences. This helps the reader understand the full impact of the disorder and how it affected the lives of everyone involved. Taryn’s entries recount the time of her disorder, and go in depth to explain her battle, the amount of time, energy and focus she put into her disorder, and how she covered it all up to keep it from her parents and her friends. The entries by Lorri, Taryn’s mother, account for the sadness, helplessness, and struggle the family faced and how the family was affected by Taryn’s disease. In great detail, we hear how she, as a mother, did everything possible to research and find solutions to help Taryn and how she coped with watching someone that she loves spiral downward. The reader is able to experience the transformation of both of these women. Through various methods of treatment, therapy, and personal conviction, Taryn finally gets to a place when she realizes she wants to survive and to treat herself well, and Lorri realizes that the only way Taryn will get better is if she wants to. The reader is able to see Lorri struggling with this concept in most of the book.
It was powerful to see the honesties (and dishonesties) of emotions unfold in the book. There is a moment when Taryn returns from her first eating disorder facility. Her parents hope she really is okay and has recovered, and her younger sisters, being more naïve and hopeful, think she is “cured.” However, as the weeks pass, the family begins to see familiar patterns and see Taryn’s drastic mood swings. One entry made by Lorri is particularly powerful for a mother to admit and feel:
“As I a saw my other two girls suffering, it was hard not to feel resentment towards Taryn. Although I intellectually knew she was also hurting, emotionally I hated what her inability to cope was doing for the rest of us. And of course, I couldn’t confront her, although my instincts told me to. I could hear the party line playing in my head. ‘She is harder on herself than we could ever be.’ So I journaled.”
While we have heard of stories in the media about girls with eating disorders, some simply sensationalistic, Taryn and Lorri’s account is real and sincere. This book is great for anyone to read who is recovering from an eating disorder and for those whose loved ones are dealing with one.
To buy the book, click here. Amazon.com gives About-Face a percentage of the proceeds from sales from our web site.
- A.J.
July 21st, 2008
The Devil Wears Prada meets a drill sergeant in this best-selling diet book, Skinny Bitch. Does that recipe sound unappealing to you, too?
Blech. It smacks of chick-lit friendly marketing with that totally hip touch of sass (read: swearing). So what is it really? A vegan diet book. Apparently it’s light on the recipes because it’s chock full of “tough-love for savvy girls”. Huh?
Look, I’m cool with veganism. And I’m all about eating less-processed foods. But it is a bald-faced lie to tell people that veganism will make everyone—no matter their body type or genetic profile—skinny. There can be health benefits that come along with cutting out meat and dairy, but that does not automatically result in elongated torsos, designer sunglasses, and a Hollywood-ready little black dress (right, front cover?).
Also, reading the title feels like chewing on tinfoil to me. There’s a lame smugness to it—it assumes that all non-skinny women are jealous of skinny ones, that all skinny women are bitches, that becoming skinny automatically lends you an air of superiority. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s dumb female-to-female hostility dressed up as faux empowerment, and to me, that goes down worse than last night’s barbecued seitan.
-A.I.
March 25th, 2008
