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

3.0

Arnold’s latest reveals how capricious first love—and our trust in it—can be. Nina, 16, is trying to make sense of the obsession she feels for her first boyfriend. “I know it isn’t okay to care this much about a boy. I know it’s not feminist, or whatever, to make all my decisions based on what Seth would think,” she chastises herself. Besides, she has grown up being told by her mother that all love has limits; it can’t just surge forth unbridled. Then, just as Nina and Seth’s relationship turns more intimate, he abandons her without explanation. In Nina’s grief, she explores the origins of her longing for love, recalling a trip she took with her mother to Italy to study statues of saints, intertwining the saints’ suffering with what she views as her own. Nina’s honest musings about her vapid relationship with Seth, as well as the relationship of her fickle parents, demonstrate a keen sense of introspection and self-respect. Smart, true, and devastating, this is brutally, necessarily forthcoming about the crags of teen courtship.
— Lexi Walters Wright, First published February 15, 2017 (Booklist).