Geek Girls Unite: How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits Are Taking Over the World by Leslie Simon
Series: No
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Pop Culture
Publisher: It Books
Release Date: 4 October 2011
Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook
Description: What do Amy Poehler, Bjork, Felicia Day, Martha Stewart, Miranda July, and Zooey Deschanel have in common? They’re just a few of the amazing women proving that “geek” is no longer a four-letter word.
In recent years, male geeks have taken the world by storm. But what about their female counterparts? After all, fangirls are just like fanboys—they put on their Imperial Stormtrooper Lycra pants one leg at a time.
Geek Girls Unite is a call to arms for every girl who has ever obsessed over music, comics, film, comedy, books, crafts, fashion, or anything else under the Death Star. Music geek girl Leslie Simon offers an overview of the geek elite by covering groundbreaking women, hall-of-famers, ultimate love matches, and potential frenemies, along with her top picks for playlists, books, movies, and websites. This smart and hilarious tour through girl geekdom is a must-have for any woman who has ever wondered where her sassy rebel sisters have been hiding.
This review is based on a copy received from the publisher.
TDF Pamela’s Review:
Geek Girls Unite is a super cute book, and I’m not just saying that because my blog is listed as one of the Fangirl blogs to bookmark. It’s part manifesto, part guide book, and it’s full of fun geeky references. But my favorite part? It’s a great way for young, burgeoning geek girls to find themselves and realize that they’re not alone.
The first thing that author Leslie Simon does is define geek. I have to admit, I was a little surprised that she moves “geek” outside of what I usually think of as its sphere. When I think of geeky, my brain automatically zooms to science fiction, fantasy, technology, science… stuff like that. But Simon defines a geek as “a person who is wildly passionate about an activity, interest or scientific field” who “will often seek out like-minded peers … in order to connect, bond, and celebrate mutual love” for their chosen geek-out topic (3).* So by this definition, someone can be a geek for sports or fashion or any number of things that I would never have thought of as “geeky” pursuits.
But the more I think about it, the more I kinda like that definition. One thing that drives me nuts is when geeks start to close the ranks and define geekiness as something that they possess and you don’t, so nyah nyah. Case in point: the hatred flung at Twilight fans at Comic Con. Look guys, I hate Twilight as much as the next geek, but really, how do you know that that Twihard isn’t going to pick up a comic book at SDCC and dive deeper into geekdom? Maybe Twilight is a gateway drug to becoming what someone like me would think of as a more traditional geek girl. And I think it’s a great idea to let girls who think they might be geeks know that you can geek out about any number of things, and it’s all good.
Geek definitions aside, the first thing that struck me while reading Geek Girls Unite is that it reads like a snarky, smart guidebook for teenage girls. Looking at the publisher, it seems like the book is categorized more generally as pop culture, but I think it’ll go over well with young geek girls. Each chapter about specific types of geek girl starts out with a quiz, much like those in the teen magazines that I pored over as a kid, and it ends with tips for the right kind of guy for each kind of geek girl (for a good take on how this isn’t too cool for non-straight teen girls, head over to The Mary Sue’s review).
There’s an interesting bit of juxtaposition with the teen-aimed prose and style, though. Simon references all kind of Gen-X stuff that had me flashing back to my own high school days. Liz Phair? Yes!
Down to the meat of the book, I was a tiny bit disappointed that there wasn’t more page time devoted to the more traditional geek girl (comic book-reading, SF/F watching, etc), and a lot of the categorical geek stuff is pretty general. Also, I consider myself a book geek, and I found a lot of the book recommendations to be pretty pretentious (that is my own literary quirk, though, and I’ll happily hand literary fiction over to the people who dig it). But on the other hand, it’s not like a fun guide to geek-girliness can even come close to encompassing every single bit of geek minutiae.
And that’s what Geek Girls Unite is: a fun book that shows geek girls that we’re not alone. There are other girls out there who geek out over the same things that we do, and I think that anything that can help foster geek girl community while being an entertaining read is great.
*Oh my god, I’m forever stuck using MLA citations. Once an English major, always an English major.
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Reviews Elsewhere
The Mary Sue
LoquaciousMuse at Film.com
TDF Pamela
The Discriminating Fangirl, who is more likely to answer to Pamela if you shout it at her, is the proud owner of an MA in English, focusing on children's/young adult literature and popular culture. She's now not using that degree to work as a project manager for a mobile app company. She reads voraciously, loves geeky movies and tv shows, reads comic books as long as she's not pissed off at Marvel, and when she's procrastinating, she enjoys playing video games. She can be contacted at t.d.fangirl @ gmail.com and followed on Twitter @tdfangirl.
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