“Orenstein has a stunning gift for finding and recounting raw, detailed scenes that demonstrate the harrowing circumstances of her young subjects’ lives—Orenstein for the first time takes laypeople into the classroom. What she finds there will force most women (and probably men as well) to cast insight back on their own adolescent school days. They may find that too little has changed.” —LA Weekly
“This book is to young girls what Black Beauty is to horses, what Upon Sinclair’s The Jungle was to the processing of meat. To read School Girls is to remember—how reluctantly!—what it means to be a girl in junior high.” —Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World