A review by hetauuu
What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold

4.0

"I was a mouth, gaping and undone. I was a satchel pulled apart and waiting to be filled. I was a chasm, a vortex, a winding endless funnel.
I was the emptiness inside of things. I was the negative space.
Fill me, feed me, give me shape.

A running theme of my 2018 reading has turned out to be books about being a woman and what that entails - My Brilliant Friend and its sequels, Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Female Persuasion, What We Owe, When I Hit You, Vuosisadan rakkaustarina, to name a few. All of these amazing books have dealt with being a grown woman, most of the protagonists 20 or older. What Girls Are Made Of tackles girlhood, especially being a teenage girl. That is very common of a young adult novel to do, but Arnold's writing style elevates the story of girlhood to a completely another level.

Our main character, sixteen-year-old Nina Faye, was told by her mother that there is no such thing as unconditional love. In a world where a woman's love is expected to be a fully devoted love, a love where the woman is willing to go above and beyond her needs for someone, to be subservient, this comment shocks her. After all, what Nina feels for Seth, her perfect boyfriend, feels like unconditional love to her. This lays the groundwork for Arnold's sharp, cut-to-the-chase analysis of the place of girls and women in society and the expectations society has of us - that we are there to love and maybe, possibly, be loved back. But only under conditions: we aren't allowed to have any, but the men that 'love' us are allowed to have a laundry list of terms and conditions.

Throughout the novel, Nina explores the idea of love and subservience. There are some brilliant shorter passages throughout the novel, most of them talking about Christian saint and martyr women and their unconditional love for Jesus. These stories, we learn, have been written by Nina. To tie the abuse and mistreatment these saints had to ensue in the name of love to modern-day romance is a brilliantly intelligent move by Arnold and one that took me by surprise in the best way possible. It shows just how far back into history these expectations are rooted in, and how, while the world has changed a lot, certain structures will always remain. Nina's story is hers, but it has this background echo of endless women throughout history.

I've read one too many young adult novels - and DNFd even more - where the author tries too hard to get on "the level of the youths" that the entire end product is just reminiscent of that "how do you do, fellow kids?" meme. What Girls Are Made Of completely lacks that flaw. Arnold does not dumb it down for her readers. Instead, she shows the reader an insane amount of compassion in sharing Nina's experiences. She shows the young audience of this novel that there is pain in growing up into a woman. That this myth of the pure, disinfected, all-around perfect teenage girl is bullshit. That there is no shame in the trauma of growing up - we all go through that.

This is a book that I would have loved to read as a teen, but even reading it in this weird limbo between girlhood and womanhood, it works on so many levels. Nina Faye is not your perfect manic pixie dream girl. She might be the most realistic, most fleshed out female YA protagonist I have ever read. She has positive and negative qualities, and neither category of her qualities are exaggerated. She is fully human, in both her joy and her sadness, her ability to love and her ability to hurt. She has gone through a lot of things that I haven't gone through, but there is also a lot of familiar ground between us. In that sense, she is a great main character. She's not just another faceless protagonist that you can lift out of a story and replace with anyone on the block. This book would not be the book it is if it weren't for Nina, and that is always a vital aspect in a novel.

Elana K. Arnold is no prude, and this book definitely uses the kind of language some term lewd or inappropriate. Answer me this, though: why is mentioning the proper functions of a female body inappropriate? How on Earth is telling teenage girls about their bodies lewd? Reading a book where the female body's functions are discussed so matter-of-factly, so desexualised, is a relief. This is a very important book for teenage girls to read and for Arnold to write it, to put to paper these common experiences, our common denominator, is a brilliant move.

What Girls Are Made Of is a book that reminds me of why young adult literature just hits a gold mine every now and again: when adults, instead of talking down to kids, use their wisdom and experience to create a relatable book for young people. Women need to stick together, and writing this book is the ultimate act of sticking together by Arnold. No woman can know another woman's story through and through, but there is so much we share. This book highlights that. The author's note at the end of the book is brutally honest and adds a lot to the reading experience. Arnold's bravery in sharing her own experiences and motivations behind writing this novel is staggering. This idea she mentions, of girls being expected to be 'sugar and spice and everything nice' in order to fit a narrow societal mold, needs to be destroyed, and books like this are a great stepping stone for that.

There is a part in this book, where a series of Italian sculptures called "The Dissected Graces" are compared to a website where you can design and order a personalised sex doll, that will stick with me for years to come. For Arnold to recognize something like that and tie it to a wider concept of 'chopping up' women and diminishing us just into a sum of our body parts is incredibly poignant. That is just one of the many eye-opening passages in What Girls Are Made Of, but to me, it feels the most hard-hitting, the most authentic. I think this is a book that every girl and woman needs to read. We all have a lot to gain from Nina Faye's story.