Rookie Yearbook One features highlights from Rookie’s first school year of existence, September 2011 to May 2012. Though I am definitely older than the intended audience (it’s for teenagers; I’m 32) it was still a satisfying read. It’s a mixture of advice pieces, personal essays, and other stuff from a mixture of teen and adult writers, on subjects including how to deal with a bad day, how to talk to your crush, racism, female masturbation, the male gaze, and street harassment. There are interviews with Joss Whedon, Daniel Clowes, David Sedaris, and other famous people; there’s also a piece of interviews with groups of ordinary people in their late teens/early twenties in Manhattan diners late at night. It’s smart and well-written and often funny and the advice pieces don’t ever assume heterosexuality; it’s upbeat without being saccharine; it’s awesomely feminist: there’s one great part where a reader of the website asks why being skinny is so fetishized by the mainstream media, and the answer is basically, because certain people/large corporations make a lot of money by making girls/women devote their resources, mental and otherwise, to the idea that they should try to attain this particular ideal of feminine beauty. Yup, that. The book also features art, in the form of collage-y page backgrounds and dividing pages (which I liked lots) and photography (which is mostly in the style of artsy fashion photography, like a teenage W magazine, which I was less interested in).
My favorite pieces were probably all personal essays, like this one by Kevin Townley about being thirteen and discovering Rocky Horror Picture Show, or this one by Jenny Zhang about moving from a diverse neighborhood in Queens to a very white Long Island town in 7th grade, or these first-time-having-sex stories by Lena Dunham, Liz Phair, and others. I also really really love the “People Reviews” (1, 2) at the end of the book: they’re funny/great vignettes of daily life, with the people at their center being rated 0-5 stars. Like, 1 star for a judgmental dentist, 5 stars for a girl who buys the last glazed donut at a local coffee place, and then, when it falls on the floor, asks the staff if the floor is clean, then says “don’t judge me” and proceeds to eat it. Or 5 stars for a barefoot guy in orange shorts skateboarding down Liverpool Street in the winter in London, giving high fives to guys in suits. I would happily read a whole book of People Reviews—it’s like the Metropolitan Diary section of the New York Times, except funnier and less cutesy.
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