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1 1 Introduction A few years ago, a friend asked me for young adult (YA) titles that represented sex positive experiences. She was preparing for her tween to begin asking ques- tions, and she was looking for books to share with her ­daughter. It occurred to me then that this ­wasn’t the easiest reader’s advisory answer, and I started wondering how sex was presented in recent titles. That was the beginning. As I started reading YA lit­ er ­ a ­ ture, I also began to consider how girls ­were con- structed in our culture—­what did we believe about how girls experienced the world around them? This was partially ­ because I was cognizant of the fact that the books I was reading ­ were actually written by adults, and partially ­ because my own plea­sure reading including blogs like Jezebel, Feministing, and the Toast, and so I was steeped in stories of how our culture was reacting to ­ women. While I began to read seriously feminist theory, I found my way to research on girlhood. It was ­ here that I began to ­ really won­der about repre­ sen­ ta ­ tion of girls in YA lit­ er ­ a ­ ture and how that contributed to what we under- stood about girlhood. This led into research, but also reignited a passion I have, not only for YA lit­ er ­ a ­ ture, but for girls in YA lit­ er ­ a ­ ture. It is difficult to strike the right tone for this book ­ because I am talking about two of my favorite ­ things—­girls and books for young adults, specifically titles that represent girls. I want it to be fun, ­because to me, reading is fun, and for the most part ­ these are books I love ­ because they represent girls in complex, messy ways. They are girls who are good, nice girls, and girls who are angry. Girls who do the right ­thing, and ­those who ­don’t. They hail from dif­fer­ent backgrounds although they are still overwhelmingly white, ­ middle class and heterosexual, which is a shame. And ­ these books are thought provoking they might make you laugh, or cry, or rage, but they are fun too. But still . . . ​I want to take seriously what the repre­sen­ta­tion in ­ these titles tell us about what it means to be a girl and consider why it ­matters that YA lit­er­a­ture contributes to girlhood.