Angelica De Vido reminds us that ‘girl power’ wasn't simply a successful marketing slogan of the 1990s but a pointer to real transformation in ideas about girlhood. Avoiding both superficial celebration and cynicism, Girlhood in the Contemporary American Novel shows how the containment of girls' coming-of-age stories by versions of the marriage plot was undone in the decades after 1990 by the success of more diverse stories about girls’ lives – stories open to popular modes of feminism still unfolding around us today.