Equal parts Our Bodies, Ourselves, Margaret Mead, and biology/history explainer, Born a Girl: It Takes Courage is an approachable feminist manifesto for today’s teens that embraces difficult topics. Organized around the fictionalized stories of five teenage girls—one each from Nepal, France, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Mexico—this nonfiction YA illustrated book lays out a frank, sympathetic description of the problems facing girls and women around the globe, from menstrual taboos/period poverty, fat-shaming, child marriage, and oppression to female genital mutilation, sexual abuse, and femicide.

Grim? Yes. Depressing? Only partly, as author Dussutour also takes pains to celebrate resilience, starting each girl’s story with a hand-drawn map of her region and following it with contextual explanations. Additional back matter lists a handful of resources to empower readers to dig into possible next steps.

Dussutour weaves together an engaging mix of narrative and facts, uplifting what could be a relentlessly awful drumroll by extolling ways that girls and women strive today to improve conditions for themselves, their sisters, and their gender. The vivid colors and friendly, often-lighthearted illustrations also help keep this eye-opening volume from devolving into an endless enumeration of ongoing brutality and misogyny.

Still, centuries of intergenerational misery are the book’s bottom line. While some things are improving for girls and women, others are not, or are even regressing. Which is why it’s crucial for today’s YA readers of all genders—our next generation of leaders, volunteers, activists, and voters—to know and understand what’s happening, be it around the corner or across the border, as empowering girls and women and improving their lot will be soon be in this next generation’s hands. 

If reading this excellent nonfiction book makes you angry, that’s the point. If it makes you want to help girls’ voices be heard, even better. And if it nudges you to support efforts to ensure that girls’ lives are equally valued in all societies and cultures—or even to join in that struggle and advocate for change—then it will have succeeded.

And that’s a good thing. 

Born a Girl: It Takes Courage
Written and illustrated by Alice Dussutour
Translated from the French by David Warriner
ISBN: 9781459838987
2024, Orca Book Publishers

Awards: Commended (2024 BC Books for Schools; 2025 Children’s Book Council & National Council for Social Studies Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People; 2025 Children’s Book Council Teacher Favorites Award 9th – 12th Grade; 2025 Children’s Book Council Librarian Favorites Award 9th – 12th Grade; 2025 Bank Street College of Education Children’s Book Committee Best Children’s Books of the Year)

Reviews: Kirkus, Booklist Starred Review, School Library Journal

Award-winning opera singer Nanette McGuinness is the translator of over 130 books and graphic novels for children and adults from French, Italian, German and Spanish into English, including the much-loved Geronimo Stilton Graphic Novels, as well as Tiki: A Very Ruff Year (nominated for the 2023 Eisner and Harvey Awards) and Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War (2023 GLLI YA Translated Book Prize Honor Book, 2023 Mosaic Prize winner, 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalist and 2023 Harvey Award nominee). Accolades have also gone to her translations of Up in the Blue Sky: Journey from the Earth’s Surface to Outer Space (2025 Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection), Ellie in First Position (2024 ALA Top Ten Graphic Novels for Children), Magical History Tour: Vikings and Magical History Tour: Gandhi (both 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalists), Luisa: Now and Then (2019 Stonewall Honor Book; 2020 GLLI YA Translated Honor Book; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2019) and California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas (2018 Harvey Award; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2018).