Customer Reviews

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher is a wakeup call to the millions of people that are contributing to the deterioration of the teenage girl. Reviving Ophelia should definitely be read by every single young female and their parents. In fact, any person who cares about a teenage girl should read this novel. Reviving Ophelia is a book that describes the obstacles that young females are faced with today. Pipher explains why so many young girls have eating disorders. Pipher also focuses on why our culture is not a healthy environment for young females. For instance, there is too much stress on being pretty, skinny, and perfect. Young girls are overwhelmed by this pressure and are therefore, developing into someone who they are not. Pipher uses various scenerios to display how perfectly healthy female children develop into disturbed, unhealthy adolescence. Pipher does an excellent job and truly cares about helping the numbers of teenage girls that are suffering.

I am a 23 year old woman and read this book when I was in high school. I very much identified with much of what Pipher deals with in the book and feel like it is quite on target for many middle-class white girls/teenagers. Other readers are correct in pointing out that she does not deal enough with the "chemical" element of depression, nor does she deal enough with the struggles of non-white girls or those who struggle with poverty. Certainly the book addresses a somewhat narrow audience. Yes, it could be interpreted as if depression and struggles were primarily environmental. However, even with a predisposition toward depression, many things can aggravate that, and I believe the book deals well with those things.

Girls can deal with a predisposition toward depression in many ways-- by maintaining self-confidence in the face of super-thin models and the media bombardment that tells girls and women not to be happy with their bodies and looks, by developing strength by understanding their own bodies and sexuality, through familial support and empathy.

I very much suggest that parents of girls/young women between the ages of 7-18 read this book. No it doesn't give the answers to everything, but I believe it does illuminate many of the struggles and challenges that girls face as they move into the teenage years. It was very helpful for me to read it as a teenager and for my parents to read it. It helped to articulate a lot of the emptiness, sadness and awkwardness I felt as I grew into young womanhood, but I couldn't exactly explain why.

This book is not to provide the parents of teenage girls with all the answers. Instead, it's a call to all of us to open our eyes to the pressures and concerns of our teenage daughters (and sons, for that matter) and start asking the questions. It is arrogant and dangerous to assume that our own daughters will escape unharmed from this difficult time.

I was especially surprised while reading this book how my own adolescent "challenges" came back to me. As I look back on my life, it's amazing how many important, pivotal moments occurred during the fog of my teenage years. It has given me renewed passion to do all that I can to be supportive, understanding and available for my children.

I recommend this book to anyone who isn't afraid to look back at their life and look forward to our future. Ask the questions...

This is an important book. It's a book teenagers should read, it's especially a book their parents should read, and it's a book educators, politicians, publishers and artists should read.

So why do I only give it three stars?

For a book this celebrated, it is just far too narrow. Yes, we do live in a look-obsessed, sexist, girl-poisoning culture. Yes, it is extremely damaging and harmful to women, and can plausibly be linked to eating disorders, self-mutilation, and depression, as well as to violence and sexual abuse. Yes, we should be worried, and educate ourselves and others.

But this book answers the question of why American girls are falling prey to depression, eating disorders and suicide at such alarming rates with only one answer, when the real answer is undoubtably a complex mixture of causes. In her anxiety to take the blame off the parents, the author doesn't have much to say about all the cases where the parents ARE even partly to blame for their teenagers depression. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers live with abusive home situations. Others suffer from clinical depressions which although they might be triggered in part by environment, can not be entirely explained by them and may need medical treatment; others suffer from appalling poverty, or racism, or other problems we don't see addressed.

I wish this book were more comprehensive. I wish it included other teenage voices, to give a more complete picture. The voices it shares with us are ones which need to be heard - but they are far from being the only ones, and I finished this book with the feeling that they had drowned certain other voices out.

I am a college student who is surrounded everyday by the topics that are repeatedly brought up in this book. Reviving Ophelia is written by an author who is also a clinical psychologist. Many of the issues that she discusses in this book have to do with adolescent girls and teenagers. Pipher wrote this book differently than a normal book would have been written. This book could be compared to a diary, because of how there were different entries for each girl she counseled. She separated each chapter by those certain crises or problems that occur in a girl's life and then within each chapter she would relive the session she had with a specific girl and sometimes would discuss how the child's family behaved. In each chapter she would discuss at least three different girls' case studies.

I think this is a great book for either a mother or a daughter to read, because both could relate to the book in different ways. If a mother with an adolescent girl reads this book she would probably find it very useful, since it points out what her child is going through at school, what's going on in the child's head, and also it can counsel the parents at the same time; if they are doing something wrong. It is great for the girls of this society to read Reviving Ophelia, because it shows that you're not alone in the struggles of your life. Some examples of the specific topics that girls could more than likely relate to are eating disorders, depression, divorce, abuse, being verbally harassed, and about having sex at an early age.

The author does a good job of putting those controversial topics that I listed above into clear view and talks about what you should do if you are in that situation or what you could do to flip your life around in the opposite direction.

I think the saddest chapter in this book shows that most girls pay attention to the society's stereotypical body type of a model. Most girls today are forced to look at beautiful skinny women in every magazine or television advertisement. An excellent example of the increasing pressure to be skinny that the author presents was in the chapter called, Worshipping the Gods of Thinness. The specfic fact that I found shocking, was the differences between the average Miss America's body type. The very first Miss America weighed 140 pounds and the average height was 5'5" and the most recent average weight is 110 pounds with the average height of 5'10". This shows how

I read this book 2 years ago - when my daughter was 15. A real eye openner for a 40-something father. It is not a 'scientific' review of personal disorders, but does a nice job outlining some of the (unfortunately) common problems that today's girls face. So many of the new freedoms that western women have at their discretion create problems for emotionally unprepared youth - boys and girls. Girls seem to face the more difficult challanges.

I recommend it often to friends as they grapple with issues with their teenage daughters.

This book is a much-needed first step in looking at the effects of modern society on young girls. Why do I call it a first step? While it is a very insightful book, the sample of girls Dr. Pipher includes is not large enough or diverse enough. Throughout the book, there is a general lack of attention to girls of color - African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, etc. The statements Pipher makes in her book are very, very important, but for the most part they take into consideration only the experiences of white girls. Societal pressures take different forms for girls of varied ethnic backgrounds, and these differences need to be acknowledged in order to conceptualize modern American culture.

Nevertheless, "Reviving Ophelia" is a book I would highly recommend, and not only to adolescent girls and their parents. All of American society, and Western society in general, needs to be made aware of what it is doing to its female youth. Adolescent boys, too, should read this, as well as adults that do not have children. These people, too, send messages to our young women, and therefore need to become conscious of what the effects of those messages are. Dr. Pipher uses the stories of her own clients to paint a vivid picture of the environment our young girls live in, and it's not a pretty one.

As a recent survivor of adolescence, I know firsthand how important Reviving Ophelia really is. This book shares a host of stories about girls undergoing a variety of crises--and while some seem a bit extreme, all the issues dealt with (eating disorders, peer pressure, self-inflicted harm, etc.) are becomingly frighteningly common.

I think this is a great book to be read by parents and daughters alike. When I read it, I felt a little bit less "alone" in a sense, knowing that almost all girls face rough times in adolesence. And while I had it much easier than most girls in the stories, some of the techniques the author tried with her patients were pretty helpful for me.

When my mom read it, it helped her to more fully understand what the middle school situation was like, and helped her deal with some of my troubles. It certainly surprised her that middle school is so different now than it was in her day! We both learned quite a bit in the reading.

I recommend this book without reservation, and I'm glad that there is finally a highly regarded, truthful portrait of the dangers girls must face in growing up.

I used this book, taken from a list provided, as the subject of a term paper for a college psychology class. This was about 3 years ago, and it still takes my mind to a place of deep thought and reveals new insights. This book was interesting to read, and the author discloses information (that is difficult to know of) in an objective manner which is not devoid of kindness and respect for all involved. I admire this author's work because it facilitated an authentic communication for me. It allowed me to have a candid audience with teenage girls, and get a glimpse of what goes on in the mind, that before I had only seen the results of. It helped me to understand what is behind the behavior. I was so impressed with this book that I told one of the high school counselors about it. He has the book now, I gave it to him. This book isn't about blame and shame, it is about understanding and knowing.

Though the simplicity of this book means it is of little use in serious research, I've found that it is an excellent tool for helping non-psychologists to see the dominance of patriarchal representation and the methods by which it constructs the female self.
I especially recommend it to busy parents with young girls, as its insights might prove useful when trying to save children from having their identities molded by less than sympathetic cultural forces.
I must repeat however, this book is clearly written for those unfamiliar with the complexities of professional psychology, and should not be considered the definitive source of information on this topic.