Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High.

Just Girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high Margaret J. Finders 1997 Teacher's College Press, New York 144 pp., $17.95 paper, ISBN 0-8077-3560-4

Margaret J. Finders, in her book Just Girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high gives readers the opportunity to examine female adolescence from a new perspective. After teaching for 13 years, she stepped away from the front of the classroom, donned jeans and tennis shoes, and moved amongst the girls of a rural Midwest school for a year. Once there, she documented events and conversations in an effort to better understand the rules, roles, and perspectives of two cliques, the "Social Queens" and the "Tough Cookies," focusing especially on their literary practices.

Just Girls views these young women through their reading and writing, that which is sanctioned by the school, such as assignments, and also the underground literacies of adolescence, such as teen `zines, bathroom graffiti, and discreetly passed notes. Her goal is to offer these documents, usually overlooked by adults, as ethnographic bits of evidence about the culture of thirteen year old girls. Her book succeeds in that it truly does offer an unusual view--almost an insider's view--of female adolescence. Finders' observations will change the assumptions of those who live and work with teenage girls. By interviewing parents, teachers and the girls themselves, she brings clarity to the Alice in Wonderland-like world of adolescence, where images are so often not reality. For example, one "Social Queen" allowed her teachers and peers to see just two books she brought to class throughout the year. The image for her peers and teacher was that she was marginally interested in books. She even denied an interest in literacy to Finders in an interview. The reality was that this girl had brought home 39 books (21 of them nonfiction) throughout the year from the library. But she had to hide her interest in reading, lest she be thought of as subscribing to parents' and teachers' wishes.

By documenting the various roles that the girls fulfill, (friend, student, daughter) she highlights the conflicting expectations and allegiances that the girls must learn to negotiate as they enter adulthood. This book is a refresher course for women readers who navigated these waters years ago and a glimpse into uncharted territory for male readers.

Just Girls has a well documented thesis: literacy plays an important role in scripting and defining the lives of these girls. Finders backs this up with numerous citations from research from the 1980s and early 90s and with examples from the girls she observes. Written records circumscribe boundaries, drawing some girls in and excluding others. Woven between yearbook scrawls of "Best Friends Forever" and "Stay Sweet and Sexy" are the codes and regulations for fitting in within this culture. Some girls live by those rules, others reject them and flaunt their outsider status. But however they choose to align themselves, reading and writing communicates to peers, teachers, and parents, that which is not spoken out loud. In her eagerness to get this point across, however, Finders occasionally repeats herself.

Parents may find insight in this book, and educators will be stimulated by the questions that arise in the final chapter about current pedagogy. Finders disagrees with many common myths about adolescence and examines how well the students are being served by the present system. For example, she quotes a teacher who calls her docile and helpful female students "spacers", putting them as physical barriers between her difficult male students. Another teacher put the same concept this way, "... I put Dottie by Eric. She's timid and he's high strung. And Angie by Craig. She's sharp and can help him." Finders looks at the education of these young women not only in terms of their development, but she also looks at more political implications--how an institution reinforces gender stereotypes.

Overall, Just Girls is an informative book that would be most useful to junior high and middle school administrators and language arts teachers. Counselors and parents may also enjoy it. This unique perspective Finders brings to this topic will be helpful to anyone who works with adolescent girls.

Reviewed by Annette Revel, counselor and researcher of gifted children, adolescents, and adults at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado.