Chapter Thirty-Six: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Seeing as I'm about to be working with middle-schoolers, when my mom found this book on her shelf, she suggested I read it.  It seemed interesting, and potentially pertinent, I decided to take a break from my steady diet of fiction to delve into this non-fiction text based on the author's own experiences as a therapist working with adolescent girls and their families.  Even though Mary Pipher was writing from Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1990s, I felt that a lot of what she describes in this book matches with my own not-too-distant experiences as a female adolescent and also with what I've noticed while working with middle-school girls as a babysitter and camp counselor.  Reading this book even prompted me to do some self-reflection on how my own experiences as a teenager still influence who I am and how I think of myself today.  On the downside, I often found the content to be rather heavy despite Pipher's explanations of how we can counteract the cultural forces that can make adolescence so difficult for girls, but the subject was so interesting (at least to me) that I was willing to keep reading all the way to the end.  I definitely found this to be a thought-provoking read.