Girls on the Verge: Debutante Dips Drive-bys and Other Initiations

In a fascinating look at how young women are coming of age in America Vendela Vidas Girls on the Verge explores a variety of rituals that girls have adapted or created in order to leave their childhoods behind. . Vida doesnt just observe the rituals she actively participates in them going as far as spending a week at UCLA to experience rush―she emerges a Tri-Delt. She also goes to Miami to learn about the quince (the Latin American celebration of a girls fifteenth birthday) to Houston to take part in a debutante ball to Los Angeles and San Francisco to talk to female gang members to Salem Massachusetts to interview a coven of witches and to Las Vegas to watch young brides take the plunge―some of them in drive-through wedding chapels. With humor insight and illuminating detail she explores girls struggles to forge an identity and secure a sense of belonging through various rituals―rituals that they embrace without necessarily understanding the comforts they seek or the repercussions of their often all-too-adult choices.