AND THE ‘GIRLS’ keep coming. As MLB contributor Emily Harburg pointed out in August 2016, publishers have given us a great number of books with “girl” or “girls” in the title, probably inspired by the tremendous success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo back in 2008.
Little has changed. We know the airlines are a “me too” industry (rushing to match fares) as are TV (they’ve got a homicide series? we’ll up the ante with a serial-killer series!) and Hollywood (with its franchises that never die—Terminator XXII, anyone?). Well, that’s what publishing looks like these days, at least popular (meaning not literary) fiction.
Even so I was startled when I took a second glance at a stack of books piled on a colleague’s desk. There are more out there now, and there are more coming! These are just some of the fiction titles. Take a look.
Of course there was Amy Schumer’s hilarious take on the Larsson phenom, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, January 2016
Then:
Songs About a Girl, by Chris Russell, May 2017
The Gallery of Unfinished Girls, by Lauren Karcz, July 2017
The Burning Girl, by Claire Messud, August 2017
The Other Girl, by Erica Spindler, August 2017
Bad Girl Gone, by Temple Mathews, August 2017
A Short History of the Girl Next Door, by Jared Reck, September 2017
Mean Girls, by Micol Ostow, September 2017
The Names of Dead Girls, by Eric Rickstad, September 2017
Girls Made of Snow and Glass, by Melissa Bashardoust, September 2017
The It Girls, by Karen Harper, October 2017
The Hanging Girl, by Eileen Cook, October 2017
And 2018 will bring more:
The French Girl, by Lexie Elliott, February 2018
The Liar’s Girl, by Catherine Ryan Howard, February 2018
The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard, February 2018
Girl Unknown (reprint), by Karen Perry, February 2018
A Girl in Exile, by Ismail Kadare, September 2018
The Broken Girls, by Simone St. James, March 2018
Girls Burn Brighter, by Shobha Rao, March 2018
But there’s hope on the horizon: Some girls grow up to become women (although many of those women don’t live all that long):
Dead Woman Walking, by Sharon Bolton, September 2017
The Woman Who Couldn’t Scream, by Christina Dodd, September 2017
The Woman in the Water, by Charles Finch, February 2018
And on a much lighter, brighter note, from the author of Under the Tuscan Sun:
Women in Sunlight, by Frances Mayes, April 2018
—Nancy McKeon
