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book reviews Her observation could serve as a commentary on the novel itself. The narrator is the dead woman Sarah, stuck in a purgatory where, like the narrator of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, she watches her family cope with her own passing. While shadow- ing her daughter, in a predictable though improbable scene, Sarah finds herself eye to eye with the man who shoved his gun up her vagina and pulled the trigger. “God, Imogen,” she says, “run, please. Call the police.” And then Voysey-Braig emulates the contri- tion at the center of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, another novel about a white South African raped by an apartheid victim during a robbery, as Sarah wrestles with racial guilt. “So I learn to turn in the scars he made in me, learn to turn in the scars I made in him,” she says, after discovering that her murderer lost his family in a gangland shooting. But where Coetzee was a master of restraint as he explored South Africa’s peculiar reckoning with crime and its own conscience, Voysey-Braig gives us too much: too much lyricism, so that sentences and sometimes entire pas- sages lose their meaning in flights of fancy. Too many narrative tricks. And too much suffering for one woman, one family, one story, to bear. Not only was Sarah raped, she was sexually abused as a child by an uncle. Although she loves her husband, and grieves to see him a widower, she is apparently a lesbian who stifled her orientation to please her family. As a child, she watched her father beat her mother, who narrates a story-within-the-story about Sarah’s great-grandmother, raped repeatedly in a British concen- tration camp during the Boer War. The author has talent that turns pages, and she spins female charac- ters who deal fiercely with their in- heritance of violence by men. The early chapters, describing Sarah’s 56 | FALL 2009 killing, are haunting. But with a cen- tral event itself so devastating, the writer needed to ration the plot sur- rounding it. Imitation is not neces- sarily a narrative sin, but it does risk comparison to a greater original. GAIUTRA BAHADUR is a freelance writer. GIRL POWER LESS Jennifer Cognard-Black Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture By Emilie Zaslow Palgrave Macmillan RUN A GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH ON “girl power,” and what comes up is a series of visual contradictions: a pink woman’s symbol with a fist in the circle; a photo of a business- woman’s legs, in stock- ings and stilettos in front of a chorus line of men’s trousers; girls sporting athletic gear; “girl power” embla- zoned across bikini underwear; and an ad for a porn film. In these images the power afforded girls is mixed. A working woman is reduced to her girly fashion sense. A little girl’s source of influence is what’s written on her panties. And almost every image is linked to con- sumerism. “Girl power” is up for sale. In Feminism, Inc., Zaslow details the contradictions within a media culture that’s been pervasive and po- tent ever since the Spice Girls popu- larized the phrase in 1997. On the one hand, she writes, “girl power is a commodification of opposition to traditional femininity.” Epitomized by such popular figures as Lisa on The Simpsons and rapper Missy Elliott, girl power encourages young women to be independent choice-makers and suggests they can control their own sexuality, style and sense of self. Yet Zaslow points out that such feminist discourse is undercut by corporate media, explaining that “[girl power] does not celebrate a feminist move- ment for social change at structural levels.” What distinguishes Feminism, Inc. from prior discussions of girl power is Zaslow’s focus on how girls react to media rather than a close analysis of that media. Although she summarizes the historical context in which girl power became a popular sensation and refers to other girl-culture stud- ies, at the heart of her book are a se- ries of focus groups and one-on-one interviews performed with 70 teenage girls from a range of class, race and ethnic backgrounds in New York City. It is the voices of these teens that compel the read- er—as when Thea and Meg argue about whether the women of The Apprentice exploit their sexiness in order “to change how things are run” or merely ob- jectify themselves by “not using their brains.” These young women have a complex understand- ing of gender, race, sexuality and class; they’re able to appreciate how Phoebe on Friends is simultaneously a dumb blonde and an iconoclast, with her “really wacky clothes” and ability to do as she feels. Yet Zaslow’s ultimate outlook for these girls is grim. Their wholesale purchase of corporate feminism shrink-wrapped with femininity leaves them with emotional contra- dictions that she calls “cultural dis- cordance.” Their powerful desire to www.feminist.org