Anatomy Of A Girl Gang

Winner, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes) Longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award A sharp and gritty novel told in multiple voices, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is the powerful story of a gang of teenage girls in Vancouver called the Black Roses, a.k.a. "the city’s worst nightmare": Mac, the self-appointed leader and mastermind; Mercy, the Punjabi princess with a skill for theft; Kayos, a high-school dropout who gave birth to a daughter at age thirteen; Sly Girl, who fled her First Nations reserve for a better life, only to find depravity and addiction; and Z, a sixteen-year-old graffiti artist. Cast out by mainstream society, the Black Roses rob ATMs, cook crack on stoves, and savagely beat down anyone who dares to harm them. Brutal and broken, they claw at the knot of darkness and violence that tightens around their lives. Told in stark, vivid, and fearless prose, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is an unflinching story about lost girls struggling for power, voice, and hope. Ashley Little is author of Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist and the YA novel The New Normal. She lives in British Columbia.

This vital resource offers an intervention designed to help divert young women from engaging in girl gang culture by providing them with the opportunities to explore alternative options for themselves that ensure a sense of self-worth and belonging in a non-aggressive culture where crime in not integral to their self-definition. This unique resource will give your school access to tools and evidence-based solutions that educate students about the risks of gang culture and provide them with strategies to rationalise and reject anti-social and offending behaviours. This essential resource will enable you to: identify the existence of both girl and boy gangs in school; develop whole school curriculum offering effective teaching and learning about gang issues; adopt a holistic approach to tackling gang culture including parents, community groups and local agencies; secure help for the most vulnerable students; and, prepare staff to deal with the difficulties that arise in tackling these issues.

Set in the early 1990s, Ashley Little’s follow-up to her award-winning novel Anatomy of a Girl Gang introduces readers to eleven-year-old Tucker Malone—the only child of a narcoleptic touring stripper—who believes his father is Sam Malone, the Boston barkeep who regularly appears on Tucker’s TV screen. He and his mother move from motel to motel until, one night in Niagara Falls, his mother is hit by a car after falling asleep in the street. Tucker is sent to live in a youth group home where he meets Meredith, a pregnant sixteen-year-old with hopes of her own; he convinces her to join him on a road trip across the border to America in order to find his father, which takes them from Boston to the west coast. Along the way they encounter some of the most notorious criminals of the 1990s, and arrive in Los Angeles just as the Rodney King riots are unfolding. His cross-country search becomes an epic depiction of mid-90s America at a crossroads as seen through the eyes of a boy, for whom finding his father is the one thing that will make him whole. Told in spare, straightforward prose, Niagara Motel is a biting chronicle during the rise of mass-media in the decade that defined the MTV Generation, and the bittersweet story of a young boy who must learn hard lessons on his way to becoming a man. Ashley Little is the author of Anatomy of a Girl Gang, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.

This groundbreaking reference work presents more than 100 articles by 98 high-profile interdisciplinary scholars, covering all aspects of girls' roles in American society, past and present. In this comprehensive, readable, two volume encyclopedia, experts from a variety of disciplines contribute pieces to the puzzle of what it means—and what it has meant over the last 400 years—to be a girl in America. The portrait that emerges reveals deep differences in girls' experiences depending on socioeconomic context, religious and ethnic traditions, family life, schools, institutions, and the messages of consumer and popular culture. Girls have been commodified, idealized, trivialized, eroticized, and shaped by the powerful forces of popular culture, from Little Women to Barbie. Yet girls are also powerful co-creators of the culture that shapes them, often cleverly subverting it to their own purposes. From Pocahantas to punk rockers, girls have been an integral, if overlooked and undervalued, part of American culture.

An all-American girl next door is murdered by her skinhead boyfriend in this true crime tale of a tragic walk on the wild side. Twenty-year-old Katrina Montgomery was blessed with beauty, brains, and a loving family. Yet something drew her to the dark side. As a teen, she snuck off to party with a Neo-Nazi gang and developed a relationship with a drug-addicted skinhead named Justin Merriman. On Thanksgiving weekend, 1992, Katrina went to a gang party and wound up in the townhouse where Merriman lived with his mother. There, Merriman raped and murdered Katrina in front of two of his skinhead buddies. Though her body wasn't found, Merriman continued his orgy of brutality, terrorizing his victims into silence. Merriman eluded justice for six years, until January 30, 1998, when a minor traffic violation led to a wild chase. After a seven-hour standoff and a bomb threat, Merriman was arrested. After police dug into Katrina’s cold case, Merriman was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death in California's San Quentin Prison. Included sixteen pages of shocking photos.

As communities face ever-growing gang-related problems, Gangs in America III provides the most up-to-date information on the diverse perspectives and complex issues that arise in our efforts to understand, prevent, and control gang violence and crime.