What Girls Are Made Of

About What Girls Are Made Of

What Girls Are Made Of is a 2017 young adult novel by Elana K. Arnold, published by Carolrhoda Lab (now Holiday House in its current edition). It follows sixteen-year-old Nina, who has just been broken up with by the boy she believed she loved completely — a boy she had shaped herself around, convinced that this was what love required.

In the aftermath of that breakup, Nina drifts through her days volunteering at a dog shelter, turning over memories and trying to locate the moment when she began making herself smaller to fit someone else's needs. The narrative is non-linear, moving between the present and moments from Nina's past — including a trip to Italy with her mother — that illuminate how she came to her particular understanding of girlhood and of what girls are expected to sacrifice for love. The fuller picture is disturbing. Something happened in Italy; something happened before that. The book earns its weight.

Arnold's prose is deliberate and lyrical, interested in the body as a site of both experience and damage. The novel is frank about sexuality, about violence, and about the way girls learn to normalize experiences that should not be normalized. It is a short book — 210 pages — but it is dense with intention.

Recognition

What Girls Are Made Of was a National Book Award finalist for Young People's Literature in 2017. It received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal, and was selected as a Junior Library Guild pick. Arnold has said the book came from her desire to write a novel about what consent culture actually looks like at the level of a teenage girl's body and daily experience — not as a lesson but as a felt reality.

Why What Girls Are Made Of Has Been Banned

What Girls Are Made Of has been banned or challenged in 39 school districts across 8 states. The challenges overwhelmingly cite sexual content — the novel's frank treatment of adolescent sexuality and its depictions of sexual violence are the most common grounds given for removal. Some challenges have also cited the book's language.

What Girls Are Made Of is frank about sexual content precisely because evasion is incompatible with what it is trying to do. The girls who most need access to language for what has happened to them — who need a book that names those experiences without euphemism — are most harmed by its removal. The book does not titillate; it witnesses. Banning it from school libraries does not protect students. It removes one of the few literary spaces where the reality of their experience might be reflected back with honesty and care.