A review by aman757
Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons

challenging emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

I began reading this book from my mom's book case because of the insight I thought it may offer into some of her parenting focuses, which at times I've found difficult to comprehend, leading me to think that some of my confusion about her goals at times may relate in part to certain gender differences with how my sister was raised. I found the general thesis or topic of this book to be psychologically interesting also. From early in the book, the author, Rachel Simmons, suggests that bullying manifests itself in a qualitatively different manner among girls than with boys, with girls being more likely to use relationship aggression tactics to inflict suffering on peers than physical acts. As the book also states, this is not a type of gender-exclusive behavior, but rather a trend that tends to emerge in the related research. That said, one of my primary dislikes about the book, which I decided to stop reading about halfway through, was that it wasn't organized in a straightforward way to argue the thesis, electing instead to focus more on "field-study" type of anecdotes. Rather, Simmons details the individual stories of girls who have bullied and girls who have been bullied to explore more deeply some of the specific manifestations of this phenomenon of aggression in girls. I believe this technique was still effective, but would have made for a more interesting book to me if the vignettes were broken up by more specific discussions of facts from the author's research.