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A history of the hey day of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front reads more like a biography of the movement, like a biography of an ex-lover on whom the author has some distance but still identifies with to a large extent. It is a loving, but not uncritical portrait of the rise of riot grrrl and its best known players. A professional (and very talented) writer, Sara Marcus includes herself only in the introduction and briefly in the epilogue. Given my own bias toward personal narratives and the every grrrl, I might have liked a little more about Sara's experiences and adventures, but I still found the book to be educational, inspiring, compelling, and enraging--in a good way.

This is a lovely and often moving story of a German-American mother and daughter. The former is trying to ignore her deeds good and not-so-good in Weimar, Germany before and during World War II, and the latter, a historian, trying to discover and understand her mother's generation's experiences and behaviors in the Nazi regime. The story goes back and forth between daughter Trudy's modern day interview project and mother Anna's youthful struggles with love and providing for her daughter.