Scan barcode
A review by lckrgr
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus
3.0
While I think this book provided a good overview of the phenomenon that was Riot Grrrl, specifically by not shying away from the schisms within the group, I found the author's writing style not terribly to my liking.
There were several points where the author wrote about important moments in the girls lives but from a weird almost fictional perspective. These sections provided, in my opinion, to much of the author's own judgment and speculation.
An example:
Mary Fondriest didn't go to any meetings in the summer and fall of 1991. What was she doing then? It's hard for her to remember. Things that happen at seventeen have a habit of turning blurry and bleeding together when looked back on a dozen years later.
Something about this rubbed me wrong. It's almost as if she took the voices away from the girls she was actually writing about so that she could tell us how she saw it all. I don't know, while I am definitely more knowledgeable about Riot Grrrl and it was a quick and easy read, I am not sure I would recommend it to anyone. I feel like I would have appreciated a more scholarly or objective approach to the movement, something more akin to Jon Savage's England's Dreaming or Marcus Gray's The Last Gang in Town.
There were several points where the author wrote about important moments in the girls lives but from a weird almost fictional perspective. These sections provided, in my opinion, to much of the author's own judgment and speculation.
An example:
Mary Fondriest didn't go to any meetings in the summer and fall of 1991. What was she doing then? It's hard for her to remember. Things that happen at seventeen have a habit of turning blurry and bleeding together when looked back on a dozen years later.
Something about this rubbed me wrong. It's almost as if she took the voices away from the girls she was actually writing about so that she could tell us how she saw it all. I don't know, while I am definitely more knowledgeable about Riot Grrrl and it was a quick and easy read, I am not sure I would recommend it to anyone. I feel like I would have appreciated a more scholarly or objective approach to the movement, something more akin to Jon Savage's England's Dreaming or Marcus Gray's The Last Gang in Town.