How Girls Are Made

McGinnis (Under This Red Rock) delivers a blistering portrayal of girlhood via multiple teens grappling with sexism, male manipulation, intimate partner violence, and more in this tautly written, emotionally devastating novel set in small-town Ohio. After the boyfriend of Shelby, a social media celebrity, punches Shelby in the face, she’s left with a broken nose and a viral scandal, and starts a new relationship marked by love-bombing and emotional control. Simultaneously, when high-achieving Fallon discovers that her younger sister, a middle schooler, is alarmingly uninformed about sex due to her school’s abstinence-only curriculum, she endeavors to shake up the system. Meanwhile, insecure teen Jobie struggles to manage pressure surrounding social media beauty standards, comparing herself to girls like Shelby or her own mother, whom Jobie believes men fawn over. Banding together, Shelby, Fallon, and Jobie launch Self Help and Fitness Training, an underground sex-ed group disguised as a self-defense club. But even as they help others, they each grapple with personal conflicts. Via the white-cued teens’ alternating first-person perspectives, McGinnis captures, with searing intensity, the psychological toll of growing up in a society that fails to equip girls with the knowledge, safety, or language they need to survive grooming, gaslighting, and systemic neglect. More than a cautionary tale, this is a call to awareness about prevalent patriarchal systems. Ages 16–up. (Nov.)