Love Is in the Hair

May 20, 2024
A high school freshman launches a campaign for female body hair acceptance, ostensibly as support for a friend with polycystic ovary syndrome, in this uneven feminist drama by Cary (the When I Grow Up, I’m Going to Play for series). After classmates mock her best friend Frankie Smith for her facial hair, 15-year-old Evia Birtwhistle starts a Hairy Girls Club and encourages peers to wear fake mustaches to raise awareness of sexist attitudes toward female body hair. Frankie rejects the club (“It’s like you’re taking what happened to me and making a massive joke out of it”), and bullies start including Evia in their taunting. As the HGC gains traction and more hot boys
see her “avec-mustache,” Evia wonders whether her club has ruined both her friendship with Frankie and her chances
of finding love. Continual pressuring of Frankie to support the HGC by Evia undercuts Evia’s hard-won moments of self-revelation. Boistrous humor adds
levity to empathetic depictions of Frankie’s growing body autonomy as well as Evia’s awareness of the sexist conditioning behind female hair removal and her own fraught body image. Evia is Greek; Frankie reads as white. Ages 12–up. Agent: Rachel Hamilton, Ben Illis Agency.

June 15, 2024
When a teen's best friend is targeted for having body hair, she fights back by starting a body hair-positive campaign in this feminist coming-of-age tale. Fifteen-year-old Evia Birtwhistle's mother has always warned her about misleading beauty ads that target women's insecurities, but that doesn't stop Evia from routinely plucking, bleaching, waxing, trimming, and shaving the hair she inherited from her Greek biological father. Frankie Smith, Evia's best friend, has thick facial hair caused by polycystic ovary syndrome. After she's attacked by school bully Madison Cox, who cruelly shaves Frankie's hair and livestreams the incident, a traumatized Frankie withdraws from school and considers transferring, a prospect that terrifies Evia. Desperate to help her friend and show the world that women's body and facial hair is normal, Evia begins a campaign on social media and at school called the Hairy Girls' Club, but soon a countermovement, the Normal Normas, starts up. Frankie isn't sure she's ready to be the public face of the Hairy Girls' Club, leading to friction between the friends, though Evia remains determined that the message of the Hairy Girls' Club will be heard. The nature of the central premise means that the story's resolution is somewhat predictable, but it's an entertaining and empowering journey all the same. Evia's character has a strong voice and a big personality, and readers will root for her through both failure and triumph. Main characters read white; names cue ethnic diversity in the supporting cast. Charming and ultimately hopeful. (Fiction. 12-18)

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