Let’s get the feminist party started with Here We Are!

Here We Are is a scrapbook-style teen guide to understanding what it really means to be a feminist. It’s packed with essays, lists, poems, comics, and illustrations from a diverse range of voices, including TV, film, and pop-culture celebrities and public figures such as ballet dancer Michaela DePrince and her sister Mia, politician Wendy Davis, as well as popular YA authors like Nova Ren Suma, Malinda Lo, Brandy Colbert, Courtney Summers, and many more. Altogether, the book features more than forty-four pieces, with an eight-page insert of full-color illustrations.

Here We Are is a response to lively discussions about the true meaning of feminism on social media and across popular culture and is an invitation to one of the most important, life-changing, and exciting parties around. (via Goodreads)

I received an eARC of this book via the publisher, Algonquin Books for Young Readers, and Netgally in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t think anyone that knows me fails to notice that I’m a feminist, and I believe intersectionality in that identity is incredibly important. So when I heard about this book, I knew I wanted to read it.

Because of the scrapbook-style format of this book, I found the loading times on my computer to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. It’s just image-heavy, which I’m sure looked beautiful in print, but drove me a little nuts reading on Adobe Digital Editions. It would freeze every time a rhinestone was on the page, which was fairly often, because it’s a cute decorative thing.

This collection was great. I’d cried once, in mostly happy tears, by page 40. Anne Theriault, I’m looking at you and “The Monster Book of Questions and Answers.” 

Designed and written for teenagers, Here We Are is exactly the collection I wish I’d had when I was a teenager, repeating some of the garbage I’d heard from my extended family and small town friends. There’s something in this collection for a wide variety of people, told in really compelling ways. Some of these pieces were familiar to me because they’d been published before, and some were brand new, but achingly familiar in my heart. I think the interviews with Laverne Cox, Laurie Halse Anderson and Courtney Summers were my favorites, because they were so incredibly important.

There’s honestly something for everybody in the Here We Are collection, and everyone can learn from this – unless you’re a meninist or MRA, in which case, I’m not sure why you’re on this blog at all. Even if you are, maybe you can take a look at why we identify as feminists.

I highly recommend this collection to everyone, but I recommend it as a physical book. The technical issues I had with it were enough for me to take this to a four star rating. You can pick up a copy through Amazon, Indiebound or your other favorite bookseller!

Disclaimer: All links to Indiebound and Amazon are affiliate links, which means that if you buy through those links, I will make a small amount of money off of it.