I enjoyed reading this book, and I took a long time to do it and think over various aspects of it. It was interesting to see, as I read, what parts of girl world are part of my oldest daughter's life and which aren't and why and which are part of my younger daughter's life and which aren't and why it is different for the two of them. It was also interesting to realize how much of this, though it deals specifically with adolescent girls, flows over into adult womens' interactions etc. There are so many highlights: the act like a woman and act like a man box, the specific instructions on how to have a difficult conversation (the SEAL process), how to apologize, the realities of being invited and not invited to things and the power plays both intentional and not that go along with that, etc. etc. There are some things that I didn't fully agree with, but I am able to articulate why I don't agree with them or why they aren't a part of my own or my daughters' realities. It was really worth reading and thinking about. There are a lot of great quotes, but this was the one I wanted to pull out the most: "We owe it to boys to do better. We owe it to the girls who are growing up with these boys to do better. Because you don't want girls having to put up with insecure, intellectually stunted, emotionally disengaged, immature guys. Worse is when some boys' insecurity combines with arrogance and privilege. Then we're dealing with guys who believe that they have the right to amuse themselves by degrading other people, and that their amusement is more important than behaving with common decency." And yes, that applies in reverse to girls as well.

I bought this because I heard Ms Wiseman on the radio talking about interviewing thousands of middle schoolers for the insights and language that became this book. I was impressed by her ability to recognize that we needed new pigeonholes for old behaviors, and her enthusiasm for the leg-work.
She really revised the consept of the bully to include girl non-physical domineering/controlling/malevolent behavior. It is sort of the non-fiction companion book to "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood (published way back in 1988).

And, in case everyone doesn't already know this: Tina Fey loved this work of non-fiction so much that she created the movie "Mean Girls" from it.

My favorite point in the book was that the clique leader, who may indeed control everyone via fear of her disapproval, often flies right under the radar of all of the adults. Including their teacher, including their parents, sometimes even including Ms Wiseman. Ms Wiseman notes that sometimes you can tell, because the wide-eyed girl who says earnestly "But Ms Wiseman, we don't really have cliques like that in OUR school," is often IT.

Be alert!

I think this book can be a little dangerous because as we read about the queen bee and her hive, we begin to try to figure out who we were growing up and even who we and others are now (as adults). Looking through this distorted lens, we may not like what we see- and it's easy to misjudge ourselves and others. I have to remind myself that the descriptions of the queen bee and her hive (chap 3) come from the author's research of problematic adolescent girls ideas. So, these descriptions are extremely limiting, distorted and completely messed up. These behaviors should not fit the behavior of adult women (but sometimes do unfortunately).

On the other hand, I do feel the book is a powerful guide to young girl's minds and what they might be facing at school. I appreciate the chapter on technology. The book can empower parents to recognize problems and solutions for their daughters. There are some helpful strategies like SEAL, p61. It is helpful in recognizing when someone is being bullied and how to help etc..

The book made me think. Each of us can decide on our own who we are. We don't need to let anyone dictate to us who we are. We define our selves. We have agency, the power to choose for our selves our own path. To understand that is a very powerful thing.

In our discussion of this book several of us also agreed that there are healthy groups of girls/women where there may be a leader who is kind and compassionate not a "queen bee" and all are treated with respect.

The problem with so many non-fiction books is that they are fiction. So I was perhaps a little suspicious as I read Mean Girls: The Official Novelization, and wondered, Is this book an accurate depiction of life as an adolescent girl? There are several flags that feed my suspicions: Wiseman’s quotes from students are full of her own jargon (“queen bees,” etc.), and while I suppose her confidants may have picked this vocabulary up from Wiseman, there is certain element of self-congratulation in letting these unverifiable people (all names have been changed!) bandy your nonce-words around. Certainly Wiseman is not humble: the about the author runs two pages (!), and she appears in a sample dialogue thus:

YOUR DAUGHTER: Ms. Wiseman, can I talk to you for a minute after class today?
ME: Sure, is this something we are going to need some time for or privacy?

You bet it is! How perceptive you are, Rosalind Wiseman, in anticipating the needs of your fictional characters!

The point is, this sounds like the profile of a fudger. And certainly some things in the book simply cannot be true. For example, Wiseman states: “26 percent of youth report having to leave home because of their sexual orientation.” 26 percent of all youth? Really? She must mean 26% of gay youth, and even then it sounds high, unless leaving home includes going to Smith; did one quarter of gay youth even come out to their parents in 2002? I’m also a little dubious of the claim that “over 70 percent of pregnant and parenting teens are beaten by their boyfriends,” but she cites a source, and I guess it’s inside the realm of chance, unlike one quarter of the “youth” population being homeless.

You will probably have noticed the ease with which Wiseman slips into the terminology of pop-sociology (does anyone else use the word “youth”?); the teen program she runs is called Empower. Wiseman takes great pains to cover different demographics, but the affluent This-American-Life world she is writing from, and presumably for, is never very well concealed. One of her funniest reveals is when she advises you as parents to invite “all the kids in the class” to your daughter’s birthday party; that is, unless “your daughter goes to a large public school and it isn’t feasible to invite so many people.” You can almost hear the snort as she writes this; after all, who sends a daughter to public school? A school with a graduating class of 25 is Wiseman’s default setting, but I don’t think it’s a large percentage of the population that shares this experience.

I know next to nothing about what girls are like in junior high (the focus years of the book, if not its attendant movie), and I’d like to trust this book, my only source of information, but Wiseman keeps coming off as too unreliable. Certainly her overt statement that the First Amendment does not cover any speech that could hurt anyone, even if the person who would be hurt is not listening at the time, is not about to endear her to me. Nor is her (what the back cover blurb calls a) “welcome sense of humor,” which seems to consist of inserting a parenthetical “pun intended.”

Some of the parts of Mean Girls I found most implausible come straight from the book. For example, remember the scene in which Tina Fey asks girls to close their eyes and raise their hands if they’ve ever been the victim of malicious gossip, and then tells them to open their eyes, and they see that everyone’s hand is up; and then she gets them a second time immediately afterwards with the same trick (“how many have gossiped maliciously?”)? I thought this was ridiculous, that no one would fall for the transparent mendacity of the second “close your eyes.” Well, Wiseman claims she pulls this twofer all the time. I’m just not sure. Frankly, her taxonomies of students (queen bee or wannabe? banker or messenger?) are unpersuasive and reductive, and her taxonomies or parents (I kid you not, there is a “What kind of parent are you?” section, with cute names for types, like in an online quiz) are either naïve or designed to flatter the reader.

Other parts of the book are just weird. Wiseman’s instruction, oft-repeated, that everything one says to or hears from one’s daughter should be written down sounds more like a mental problem than anything else. And needless to say the sample dialogs owe more to guidance counselor handouts than reality, what with their earnest “I-messages,” heartfelt explanations, and respect for each other’s feelings. There’s also the ever-present specter of a wise and compassionate school official (a “trusted teacher”) who can come riding to the rescue if things get out of hand. I wonder whom Wiseman has in mind for that role...

So, with all that...is junior high really like this for girls? Because it was nothing at all like this for me. This could be because I was a boy, it could be because I was completely alienated from human experience at the time, and it could be because life was different in the last century. Certainly the book’s brief description of boy culture only seems partially applicable to adolescence as I knew it. In junior high I was in a clique, it had a “queen bee” if that’s what you want to call the leader, and there may have been a bit of politicking to get into his good graces, but not very much. He was the leader because he thought of fun things to do and liked to set stuff on fire; I doubt he had any real power. Sometimes people wouldn’t get along. There wasn’t very much drama in the drama.

Wiseman’s examples all seem to be predicated on a system in which the actions of the popular kids reverberate through the whole school, a thesis more tenable at Riverdale High than in the real world. I couldn’t name the most popular girl in my school. Certainly there were many popular people in my class, but they were an undifferentiated mass to me, as indistinguishable as a group of imperial stormtroopers; they were, of course, enemies, but what was going on in their world was completely terra incognita. Perhaps that’s due to my pathological social cluelessness, and perhaps it’s due to my having gone to one of those public schools with their ludicrously large classes.

So do (or did) girls spend all their time politicking and betraying their friends in an attempt to please a “queen bee”? Girls should go read this book and then report to me if it’s true.

Also if one quarter of you spent your teen years on the street due to sexual orientation, let me know. I’ll owe Wiseman an apology.

I'd heard a lot of buzz about this book years ago, and as my daughter is now a tween, I though it might be a good resource.

There are some helpful things--particularly the analysis of the hierarchical structure of girls' friend groups or cliques. Wiseman also does a great job helping you as a parent navigate with your child the minefield of bullying.

I found her approach to drinking and drugs and partying less helpful, though it certainly backed up my instinct to get my kid into Christian school for middle school, where at least I can have some expectation that other families don't consider being sexually active at 12 something "normal".

There's no sense that parents have any control about creating alternate communities where kids can hang out and have fun without underage drinking and illegal drug use. These things don't have to be "givens" of adolescence. There are many positive things parents (and kids themselves) can do to steer teens away from partying.

If you're a Christian parent, be aware that her suggestions for dealing with some issues seem a bit too much throwing in the towel, with an underlying assumption that all kids will run amok and all you can do is damage control.

1) Main messages I took away from this were:
a) talk to your daughter like you both work in a corporate office and she's your business colleague.
b) let her be as obnoxious to you as possible, e.g. eye rolling, texting instead of listening to you. Under no circumstances must you ever hurt her feelings or upset her, no matter how rude she is!

2) Contradictory to the above, we're advised to deliberately embarrass our daughters 'in a good way', e.g. singing along to the radio when her friends are in the car, or dancing in front of everyone while chaperoning her school dance. Yeah, that's really gonna help the relationship.

3) Whole concept of Girl World was over-explained and the metaphor just dragged on far too long. Entire book was too long. Needed quick, snappy dot points and a format that allows a reader to skip straight to a particular issue they're having, not huge lengthy rambling paragraphs.

4) The author's 'direct quotes' from teenagers sounded fake. I got sick of reading the author's repeated statements about how many young people she has worked with and how amazingly experienced she is. The best thing you can say about this book is that 'Mean Girls' came out of it.

THIS should be required reading in high ²school. I always wished for a manual to help me navigate through girl world, and this is it. Years after high school, and I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm always baffled by the grown women who think I want to be third wheel to their BFF duo, or who readily call on me for babysitting and volunteer work but not hangouts. And I still don't know how to stop a friend from vindictive gossiping without becoming her next victim.
But overall, poor experiences make me feel so incredibly grateful for the friends I have. One of my cousins pulled her kids out of school and drove 30 minutes to see me when my grandpa died even though she was the one pregnant with twins.
Another truly dear friend often reaches out to connect me with someone I know at my next location every time we move even though I haven't seen her in over a decade-- she's also the one i pray for when i see her family is going through something difficult over social media
And another friend I still hold dear checked on me every week during my husband's last deployment.
That's to name a few. I have a lot of wonderful friends or cousins, but instead of expecting to make a lot of friends every time we move, I set the expectation of making one friend worth keeping.
Our military lifestyle has taught me something really wonderful about friends: the ones worth keeping around are the ones you can go years without seeing but still feel like you haven't missed a day.
Some complained about the stereotyping in this book, but I think it plays an important part with 1)knowing how to respond to certain behaviors and identifying what they're trying to accomplish 2) knowing that everyone plays these different roles and doesn't fit perfectly into one singular box.
I'm buying this book again when my daughter starts suffering from teenage woes.

Adolescence is hard. Period.

I really thought this book was outstanding. It really helped me understand my high school experience. I hope it will be as helpful for girls navigating the waters of middle school and high school.

I enjoy pop psychology, and I liked the movie Mean Girls (which was based on this book), so I thought I'd give it a try.

Reading this did not give me horrible flashbacks to my middle-school years. :-) But it did give me some interesting insights on roles girls play. Queen Bee, Sidekick, Wannabe, and Target are all pretty obvious, but Banker was a surprise to me. I assumed she was a girl who tried to buy popularity or friendship. Actually, she is someone who collects embarrassing or damaging information about others and then leaks it or otherwise reveals it to add to her own power. Basically, she's Henrietta Kissinger. Other girls do not necessarily imitate her, but she is never left out of anything. Parents and teachers often find her baffling because she seems sweet and inoffensive, yet others her age seem afraid of her.

Helpful resource for talking with girls as they go through their tween and teen years. Many sections seemed a little old to be relevant for my 5th grader, but other sections rang true now. I'm sure I'll be reaching back for this as she matures and faces other hurdles.

I really wasn't all that surprised by this book, at least not by the "revelations" of the late-teen issues of chapters 8-9. It really doesn't appear to be all that different from when I was coming up 25 years ago, unless my experiences were precocious. Maybe they were, but somehow I think there's still a spectrum of social life out there, just as there was back in the day. That said, I'm still not all that sure that I'm ready to deal with these things as a parent of a daughter, even as in-the-know and been-there-done-those-mistakes as I am. There are some good reminders in the book about what life is like for the pre-teen and teenaged set, and I really liked the examples of how to approach the situation from a parent's point of view (hopefully using language that won't shut down the kid). I was less convinced of, what I felt were, too-clearly-delineated roles within pre-teen cliques from 5th grade on. What I did notice back then was girl-bullying of "loners" and "nonconformists" and a lot of what they now call RA (relational aggression), but it really wasn't performed under the same structure as is outlined in the book. Maybe that is something that was either more present at a younger age a few decades ago (I remember within-group power plays happening in 2-3rd grade, by 5th grade the cliques in elementary school were pretty set), my jr high was too big for magnified nonsense like that (there were 1200 kids in 2 grades), or I just didn't notice groups of girls overtly competing with each other under the Queen Bee hierarchy after early elementary. I guess I'll get to step in it all once again as I watch my daughter navigate the waters... Yay. At any rate, this book will be a worthwhile reference for our family in a few years, I hope an updated edition comes out then to put on the shelf.