Follows a girl in the 1920s as she strives to become a drummer, despite being continually reminded that only boys play the drums, and that there has never been a female drummer in Cuba. Includes note about Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, who inspired the story, and Anacaona, the all-girl dance band she formed with her sisters.

Lauded as a sharp chronicler of the modern age who humanizes her subjects even as she skewers them, Curtis Sittenfeld showcases her talents in this first collection of short fiction. Throughout the ten stories in You Think it, I'll say it, Sittenfeld upends assumptions about class, relationships and gender roles in a nation that feels both adrift and viscerally divided. In "The World Has Many Butterflies," married acquaintances play a strangely intimate...

In central Texas in 1899, eleven-year-old Callie Vee Tate is instructed to be a lady by her mother, learns about love from the older three of her six brothers, and studies the natural world with her grandfather, the latter of which leads to an important discovery.

Benny anticipates making friends with the new kid down the street, but when he finds out that she's a girl, he is very disappointed.

Found wandering alone in a bombed-out Afghan school, 15-year-old Parvana mystifies American military forces by remaining silent, while spending her time remembering the past four years of her life, having been reunited with her mother and sisters and living in a village where her mother's finally managed to open a school for girls.

"Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother's disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman—especially a Black woman—can find herself on trial for witchcraft. But fourteen years have passed since her mother’s disappearance,...

Miri returns to Asland and calls upon all of her knowledge of rhetoric and other useful lessons learned at the Princess Academy when she and the other girls face strong opposition while working for a new, fair charter.

Love and marriage and coming to terms with the mate one has chosen are examined in this comedy of cross purposes when a father stipulates that his elder, and shrewish daughter, must be married before the younger.

In a future of high technology and genetic modification the Coral Kampii, like legendary mermaids, live isolated from the Above World, but when the devices that allow them to breathe underwater start to fail, thirteen-year-old Aluna and her friend Hoku go to that forbidden place to find help.

On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement, forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion. It was the first female class action lawsuit, and it inspired other women in the media to follow suit. Povich was one of the ringleaders. She tells the story of this dramatic turning point through the lives of several participants, and shows how personal experiences...