Chérie Turner – Everything You Need To Know About The Riot Grrrl Movement: The Feminism of a New Generation (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2001)

At 64 pages in total, this cannot be considered to be a full and comprehensive account of Riot Grrrl, but then, it doesn’t aim to be.

The key strength of this book is that it works very well as an entry level text to Riot Grrrl, and as such it would be very good for very young readers, say 10-13 kind of age. It is extremely readable and accessible, but for anyone wanting more detail, more debate, more depth, it is the wrong book.

The book is divided into four chapters:

The Revolution: A fairly simplistic outline of how Riot Grrrl came to be, the media reaction to it, and its commercial exploitation by the Spice Girls and advertising.

Grrrl Power: Ideologies and manifestos

Women Who Rocked Before: focusing on punk women from the seventies and eighties, focusing specifically on Exene from X, Joan Jett, Poly Styrene and The Slits.

Where Are They Today?: The legacy of riot grrrl, post its first wave, and pre Ladyfest.

There then follows a glossary, which again pinpoints its appeal to younger readers, a for more info section, and a further reading section, all of which would provide some areas of further exploration for the more intellectually curious reader. The index will be helpful in that respect as well.

As this is an overview, the book doesn’t include any original interviews, but does include interesting and relevant material culled from books, magazines and zines. The pictures are good as well, and there are some reproduced zine extracts.

In summary then, good for the pre-teen or tweenager section, and a nice addition to school libraries in that regard, but beyond those areas it’s hard to see its appeal.