Geek Girls Unite

August 22, 2011
While geekdom has long been portrayed in pop culture as a boys’ club, Simon (Wish You Were Here) catalogues the wide variety of geek girls in this entertaining look at embracing nonconformity. No longer a four-letter insult, “geek” is now a badge of honor for a person who’s passionate about something and strives to be an expert. This “something” could be anything from the television oeuvre of Joss Whedon to crafting with an alternative twist. In an attempt to bring other like-minded women into the fold, Simon turned to the Internet and created the Geek Girl Guild, a sort of alternative sorority for those who shrug off conventionality. Dividing the book into six chapters, each devoted to different subspecies of geek, she explores the origins, defining characteristics and role models who’ve made it big. Each category—fan girl geek, literary geek, film geek, music geek, funny-girl geek, and domestic goddess geek—comes with an approved reading, watching, or listening list, along with a quiz at the start of each chapter for readers to gauge their own geek quotient. While it’s obvious that not everyone will fit into the categories Simon defines (a point she concedes early on), bringing girls out from behind fan boys’ shadows is a worthy endeavor.