Five twenty-something friends share a brownstone in hip, downtown Brooklyn, and discovering the ups and downs and ins and outs of their "semi-adult" lives. Spoiled and stylish Pia finds herself completely unemployed, unemployable, and broke. So what is a recent grad with an art history degree and an unfortunate history of Facebook topless photos to do? Start a food truck business of course!

Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.

Nancy Drew fans will fall for the first title in Leslie Margolis's pitch-perfect middle-grade series, The Maggie Brooklyn Mysteries. Dogs are disappearing in her neighborhood, and Maggie Brooklyn Sinclair knows all about it. After all, she has a semi-secret after-school gig as a professional (ok, amateur) dog-walker. Maggie hates to see a pup in trouble, so she's even willing to help her ex-best friend Ivy recover her rescue-dog, Kermit. Kermit's being held for ransom, and Maggie has noticed some suspicious behavior lately. But she never suspected her crush Milo could be involved . . . Don't miss these other stories by Leslie Margolis: The Maggie Brooklyn Mysteries Girl's Best Friend Vanishing Acts Secrets at the Chocolate Mansion The Annabelle Unleashed series Boys Are Dogs Girls Acting Catty Everybody Bugs Out One Tough Chick Monkey Business

Overwhelmingly, Black teenage girls are negatively represented in national and global popular discourses, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. Such popular representations are pervasive and often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corruptive, uncivilized, and pathological. In She’s Mad Real, Oneka LaBennett draws on over a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are in fact strategic consumers of popular culture and through this consumption they assert far more agency in defining race, ethnicity, and gender than academic and popular discourses tend to acknowledge. Importantly, LaBennett also studies West Indian girls’ consumer and leisure culture within public spaces in order to analyze how teens like China are marginalized and policed as they attempt to carve out places for themselves within New York’s contested terrains.

“Rebecca, Ruth, Deborah, and me, Rachel: the Joyce girls. No, we are not Jewish, but rather Irish. Our Mom, yes, Sarah—what else?—was the oldest offspring of a stern fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher, our grandfather, Isaiah Cummings.” So opens this wonderful family saga. Narrated by the youngest, Rachel, the writer, this is the story of the four daughters of Irish Catholic Judge Joyce, a very influential man in Brooklyn, set in the middle of the twentieth century. What a problem their father’s Catholicism created in the Cummings household. Rebecca, the corporate attorney, Ruth, the teacher and homemaker, Deborah, the singer, and Rachel, the author. All successful, all beautiful, but all so different. Grow with them, laugh with them, cry with them, love with them as they mature from little girls, to young ladies, to mature women. Experience their joys, their pains, their lives and relationships with all the highs and lows. You will love returning to an idyllic time, a time gone by, but very much alive in our memories.

The edtior at Essence magazine Demetria Lucas shares her ultimate dating what-to-dos and what-not-to dos in this fun guide to living the fabulous single life. According to Demetria, most women are too focused (and stressed) on the difficulties of meeting Mr Right to enjoy the dating experience. Instead A Belle in Brooklyn celebrates the joys of singlehood, encouraging personal development and offers tools to help women increase their odds of finding a suitable mate when they are ready for one. Viva la Liberte!

Tells the stories of the Jewish women who came of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s--the choices they made, and the boundaries within which they made them.