A touching novel about girls and their mothers, sibling rivalry and kinship, and the mysterious tug between love and antagonism that lies at the heart of every family. The year Tilden turns twelve, her mother, Frances, falls in love and moves the family north. Soon the watchful, wise Tilden and her rebellious younger sister, Elizabeth, are navigating a new household amidst the awkward and alluring terrain of adolescence. But when Frances suddenly discovers a lump in her breast, her daughters must confront the unpredictablility of her illness. With heartbreak and humor, these characters exposes a world of secrets and learn to survive in the face of life's contradictions. This moving, emotionally stirring debut novel will appeal to fans of Anna Quidlen's One True Thing and Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here. Funny, haunting, and unflinchingly truthful on every page, What Girls Learn is a book that will be read--and cherished-- for years to come.

In the winter of 2001, 29-year-old Walt Steadman survives a shooting in his favorite Boston café that leaves four people dead. In the aftermath, Walt forms two new relationships: one with Ginger Newton, a privileged, reckless, Harvard undergraduate who is interviewing women about their lives for a book called Girls I Know, and the other with 11-year-old Mercedes Bittles, whose parents were killed in the restaurant. Wounded but resilient, all three must deal with loss and grief and the consequences that come when their lives change in unexpected ways.

Discusses the physical and emotional changes associated with puberty in boys and suggests ways to ease the adjustment to these changes.

Thirty-eight different girls give advice on specific issues including sisters, school, passing notes, adults, divorce, babysitting, boys, sport, drugs, and personal appearance.

At last, we have the scientific evidence that documents the manybiological gender differences that influence learning. Forinstance, girls talk sooner, develop better vocabularies, readbetter, and have better fine motor skills. Boys, on the other hand,have better auditory memory, are better at three-dimensionalreasoning, are more prone to explore, and achieve greater abstractdesign ability after puberty. In this profoundly significant book, author Michael Guriansynthesizes the current knowledge and clearly demonstrates how thisdistinction in hard-wiring and socialized gender differencesaffects how boys and girls learn. Gurian presents a new way toeducate our children based on brain science, neurologicaldevelopment, and chemical and hormonal disparities. The innovationspresented in this book were applied in the classroom and provensuccessful, with dramatic improvements in test scores, during atwo-year study that Gurian and his colleagues conducted in sixMissouri school districts.