Constant Reader (YA) January 2026 How Girls Are Made by Mindy McGinnis

 

The older I get the more haunted I am by the contradiction of so many of the stories I continue to  hear from the works of academics such as Thomas Frank or the liberal journals in regard to Middle America. By their own definition the people of 'red states'  are suffering because of decades of votes for Republicans who according to those scholar will always act against the economic interests of the citizens. The implication is that they need the values of liberalism and Democrats far more than those who are fortunate enough to live in blue states.

But that concern for those people has always stopped at the borders of their own part of America. Just as frequently these writers view these individuals not as citizens of the same country or even those from a foreign country but from a backwards tribe that has missed at least one or two steps on the evolutionary ladder. Their customs and practices are viewed not merely as alien but signs of a kind of insanity. And unlike those colonialists the left judges with equal contempt, these people don't even deserve the benefits of blue-state civilization. They're not even work speaking to, despite the fact that they are clearly in need of help, until they lift themselves up by their bootstraps. And if they can't understand it they basically deserve what they get from Republicans.

Having spent so much time among the left in my online experience I always feel compelled to remind them that African-Americans, women, LatinX and the LGBTQ+ community live in every state in the union, even those that haven't voted Democratic in those commenters lifetime. They at least deserve help even if so many of those around them do vote Republican. I'm almost always greeted with name calling by pointing out what seems to be an obvious fact.

For that reason I've always had an interest whenever I read YA fiction that is set in towns in these supposedly deep red states. One of the best authors of this group is Mindy McGinnis. If you've been reading this column from the start you might recall that the very first Constant Reader Book review  was about her Female of The Species the story of a female serial killer who has lived her life in a small town in the Rust Belt of Ohio. McGinnis lives in that state and the majority of her fiction deals with women who live in these towns that America has left behind and are trying to find a way out. Her lead characters are well aware of how the rest of the country views them: in A Long Stretch of Bad Days, a teenager calls her podcasts 'Stories from Flyover Country' because she's playing as much on liberal guilt to help her save herself as her own work.

According to the sleeve of her most recent novel How Girls are Made McGinnis says her books: "deliver grit, truth and an unflinching look at humanity and the world around us." Having read five of her novels in the last four years I can say  her description is accurate. Modestly she leaves out the riveting prose and darkness that is always driving her work. It's the main reason that when I saw How Girls Are Made at a bookstore in a train station I waited all of two minutes before purchasing it and spent the next two weeks devouring it.  It's one of her most inventive narratives to date, telling the story of three teenage girls in the fictional town of Presnick, Ohio, all of whom are in their senior years of high school when the novel begins, all of whom want nothing more than to find a way to get out of the town in some way. We're told on the first page that there's a funeral and one of those girls won't survive the narrative.

McGinnis divides her story from each girl's perspective. Shelby Black is the first one we meet. She's training to become a MMA fighter and has already become successful enough that potential endorsement deals are lined up. At the start of the book she tells us: "Up until last week, the only thing I ever lost was my virginity."

Then earlier that week she lost her first fight ever and at the start of the novel her boyfriend has just punched her in the face. The person who comes to her rescue is Fallon Holloway which Shelby resents because "they've never spoken despite having gone through twelve years of school in a class of 65. Shelby has lived her entire life on the idea of being tough and she sees this as a sign of weakness. The fact that Fallon holds her while she was cries is something she's not prepared to deal with.

Shelby spends much of the first third of the novel pretending this doesn't bother her; she ignores the fact that her family puts up a restraining order and resents the idea that she needs to go to therapy. She honestly seems more concerned about her stepmother chooses to criticize her for her attitude of toughness. Taylor has always felt her fighting unladylike and Shelby has always been sensitive to this criticism. Now it becomes unbearable.

Fallon has always been something of a people pleaser, someone who takes it on herself to solve every problem and never disappoint anybody. Then her younger sister Farrah misspeaks and it becomes very clear that her thirteen year old sister knows nothing about sex. Fallon asks her sister to describe the sex ed course:

"There was a Power Point with kids smiling at each other and a pie chart about TSDs and some divorce statistics and then the lady said that most high school relationships don't last, and she told the boys that if they have sex with their girlfriends, that girl is probably going to be married to someone else someday, and they wouldn't have wanted to have slept with someone else's wife, would they?"

Fallon's reaction is understandable: "Your sex ed instructor was talking about sex as if the female involved has been somehow claimed by the first male she is with? Like we're hand-me-down sweaters as yard sales?...And also that we have no thoughts or feelings about this ourselves, that we're just an object in a male oriented transaction?"

There was no talk about birth control, prevention or condoms and that old chestnut "boys only want one thing' was used.

Farrah tells Fallon this isn't her fight. The next question is: "Then whose is it?"

Fallon's best friend is Jobie. We learn immediately that ever since she got her first phone in sixth grade she has been doing what far too many girls have been doing "following the trend, maximizing the filter and using the right hashtag."  Like too many girls in McGinnis's fiction Jobie believes she has nothing to offer the world and that her entire life is based on her social media count. She truly believes the only way to matter in the world is to what virtual strangers think of you. Indeed she's dealing with that when Fallon texts her with: "Farrah doesn't know what an erection is." Jobie can't understand why Fallon doesn't care about either her social media profile or her physical appearance. Even when she's trying to talk to her Jobie can't be bothered to stop looking away from her own face.

Fallon comes up with the idea of giving an unofficial sex ed class for the people at girls at Presnick. She ends up roping in Shelby who claims not to care. She is so focused on her own image and how it reflects on her that she finds herself involved because they need three names for the paperwork. More importantly Shelby is the only girl they know who's had sex. Ironically for a girl who wants to talk about sex ed, Fallon is absolutely unable to talk about it and Shelby absolutely is.  "We're just talking about how most girls aren't prepared for the reality of a penis," she says casually to a bystander who happens to be the only out lesbian at Presnick. Mal wants to promote one for high school.

It is Shelby who comes up with a cover name for the club: Self-Help and Fitness Training" which of course has the acronym of SHAFT. (Obviously Shelby is a bad mother who won't shut her mouth.) This club is obviously a good idea and the kind of things this high school and the town needs. The problem that as the novel unfolds each one of the girls is dealing with issues that their own flaws keep getting in the way of.

Fallon is terrified of getting into trouble if she gets found out. As the course make very clear her town is very conservative when it comes to sex and even the idea of it being discussed among teenagers by themselves clearly repels them. All three sets of parents are relatively open-minded but that doesn't make them any less overprotective when it comes to teenagers even so much as partying and having fun. It's clear that Presnick is a town that wants to be the picture of model America even though we very quickly find out everyone in this town has secrets.

Shelby very quickly becomes fixated on the new boy in town Baxter.  Baxter has just moved from Chicago and therefore has the benefit of not knowing the horror story of what happened to her in the past week. Shelby and Baxter begin talking flirtatiously and Baxter sends her enough texts to make her feel loved and needed.  Slowly, however, Baxter increasingly begins to correct her behavior and a vulnerable Shelby keeps making changes.

Jobie, in the meantime, is fixated on getting a boy's attention and eventually ends up on a site called Rock Bottom. As Jobie describes it:

Rock Bottom has been around since the Internet got social and quickly gained a reputation as a forum that hosted incels, upvoted misogyny and was generally populated by lonely twenty-something dudes living in their mom's basement…These days, Rock Bottom isn't any more deplorable than any other place on the Internet."

This in itself should be a warning to Jobie who has found a site on it called HardLooksMaxxing where 'cosmetic surgery, fillers and Botox are the first line of defense against aging. Or in the case of younger members like me – against being average.

There are signs of just how low Jobie's self-esteem. At one point early in the book one of the monitors tells her the narrative is:

After reading this, what she walks away with is that she'd be better off going for full decapitation and getting a new head.

Jobie's reaction is the telling one: "I consider that for a second, fully aware its not possible, but also more attracted to the idea than I care to admit."

Even the idea the concept of perfection is being done by the Internet itself never seems to occur to Jobie. She focuses on the idea of a completely new plastic surgery that costs $75,000 and the idea of not being able to do it causes her to break down in tears.

And that, I think, is all you need to know about the actual plot. So let's talk in more general terms of McGinnis's themes. Much of them comes from the title of the book. It would seem to suggest the idea that is not uncommon of certain people in our society, particularly among those very vocal left-wing people that Americans are made a certain way because of their environment, because of society. They would argue that the people of Presnick are lost to the world because they live in Middle America, which is of course made of the kind of people who believe  in the kind of sex-ed that the students in this small town must live through. But the three narrators live in the exact same environment as the adults and they clearly know that the adults who put this on their curriculum are absolutely screwing up younger girls like Farrah's lives by making this gospel. They grew up in this environment but no one would think of them as deplorable.

Ah but what about the boxes that too much of America puts these girls in and the need to conform to them. In a sense all three narrators are trying to deal with their own boxes. However McGinnis has spent her career arguing against the idea of environment and nature determine who you are and what you do. Every female lead in her stories is aware of the choices they make, whether it is to start chasing the dragon of heroin, to become a serial killer or in How Girls Are Made the choices all three girls. McGinnis makes it clear so many times in this book how each girl is offered a choice to deviate from the path they've taken by their friends or their therapists or even each other. And until the end they all believe their own judgment is superior as opposed to everyone else's.

All have contradictions in them they refuse to acknowledge during the course of the novel. Fallon believes she is the only person who can solve problems but she cares equally about being exposed and being the subject of the glare of her small town. Jobie cares far more about what absolute strangers care about her then her friends but also is all too aware – to a point – of the flaws of the girls around her. Shelby has a persona that makes her believe that appearing weak to anyone is the worst thing possible but she also claims not to care what the outside world thinks when she is abrasive, loud and profane. All of these flaws lead to the tragedies that each girl goes through.

There's also the fact that all of these girls are eighteen and haven't spent much time in the real world, only online and in the area of their small town.  Fallon cares too much about what people in it think of her, Shelby claims not to care at all and Jobie cares far more about what an invisible world cares about her. None of them care enough about the well-being of the people who are not in their immediate circle when they make their decisions and that increasingly leads to things getting worse and eventually tragedy. And fear is a factor in how everyone operates: fear of exposure, fear of seeming weak, fear that bad things will happen. All the characters care too much about the wrong things and too little about the right ones.

McGinnis, as is usually the case, does not judge the girls for what they do while making it very clear that the town and the rest of the country does. She admits that they keep making mistakes but she is clear they make them of their own free will. Each girl, I should add, has something truly horrific happen to them by the end of the novel and while we know one of them will not survive it, we realize that as bad as they things are, they didn't have to happen. Death, as we so often are told, is the easy way out. For those who live and have to deal with the trauma of surviving is much harder.

Late in the novel a therapist to one of the surviving girls makes a statement that is probably the thesis of the novel.

Everyone is who they are for a reason…What if I want to be something else?

Then we do the work. We do the work, and we build you back up, not basing your worth on a boy, or  a relationship…or your social media, or what people think and say about you. We build you up and make you strong, using your own words and your own beliefs about yourself. We build you up, using things that no one can ever take away from you.

Every McGinnis novel I've read has a climax that ends with some kind of tragedy and as should be clear How Girls Are Made is no different. But McGinnis never ends any of her novels in despair. She doesn't pretend that the path forward will be easy or guarantee that they'll survive it but that's because she knows there are no guarantees for anybody in the world, whether they are born in wealth or poverty, in a red state or a blue state, whatever gender, race or sexual orientation they are.  You have to decide to change and then you have to do the work. That's all any of us can do.

And perhaps there's hope for the bigger picture. I think that's why McGinnis chooses to end her novel the way she does. Maybe there's a chance that the seed that the girls planted did take root in Presnick after the novel ended, not just literally but figuratively. And if can happen in a small town in Ohio maybe it can happen everywhere.