With a cover endorsement from the mighty Amy Poehler and a back cover blurb that takes me back to my mid-90s fanzine days, this young adult novel has a lot going for it. It was initially brought to my attention by someone on Twitter, who as a sister mid-90s Riot Grrrl fan recommended it to me - and she was right!
In Moxie, Texas-based writer Jennifer Mathieu has beautifully channeled the anger and fury of young women during the Riot Grrrl era and brought it bang up to date in this contemporary high school setting.
Our shero Viv attends school in a small US town where football is king and casual sexism in the corridors is something the girls are encouraged to shrug off. Rooting through her mum's box labelled 'My Misspent Youth', 16-year-old Viv finds a stash of '90s Riot Grrrl fanzines, photos of her mum as an angry, feminist teenager and tapes of music by grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy. All of which inspires Viv to secretly start her own fanzine, Moxie, which she distributes to the girls at school to encourage them to fight back against the rampant sexism inherent in their lives.
What I particularly love about Moxie is that Mathieu doesn't shy away from the word 'feminism'. In fact, she goes to great lengths to have the characters realise that feminism is something to be embraced and welcomed into their lives, she shows how feminism makes their lives better, and how it enriches them to live a safer and happier life without experiencing everyday sexism and being grabbed by entitled boys in the school corridors.
This is a bloody great book - both for teenage girls and for grown women like me who lived through and loved the Riot Grrrl movement. 'Moxie girls fight back!'
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