Library Submission #1 - Girl Code
Book Review - Girl Code by Clara Alwill
Photo credit: Lawrence Chismore via Unsplash
Best Read: At brunch with a glass of champagne and in the voice of your designated hype friend.
When the first edition of this book came out it was very on brand for the time. It was around 2015 and pop culture was filled with Millennial Pink and climbing the corporate ladder was being replaced by being a Girl Boss (female empowerment’s newest flavor). But now that it’s almost a decade later, does it really hold up?
Favorite quotes for your vision board:
“Your reality is yours and yours alone. And it should be as fabulous as you want it to be.”
“When you’re aligned with your purpose and truly doing what you love, it feels like a privilege to get to do it every single day.”
“When you embrace your fear, you become fearless.”
‘Trusting your own brilliance means believing in your own voice, your story, in the power of your words, in your instincts and in your passion.”
“You’ve got to stop being who you think you should be and start being who you truly are.”
“What if we reframed failure?”
“Just because something doesn’t work out one way, does not mean it can’t workout another way.”
“You’ve got to interrupt fear with gratitude.”
Key Takeaways:
Other girls are not your competition. You are good enough without needing to compare to someone else.
Honestly that was the only part of the book that resonated with me. Most of the book still reads like it is obviously written in the #Girlboss #MillennialPink vibe of the mid-2010s that I grew up in. Though this can come from the fact that the writer Clara stated a couple times she did work at MTV prior to going out on her own, and being a millennial you understand that back then MTV was what set the culture vibe for us.
The was some decent interviews included in the edition I read all of which speaks to the persistence and vision each person she interviewed. However, maybe it’s where I am in life, maybe it’s that it’s 2024 and life is very different from how it was in the 2010s but this book didn’t speak to me how I really thought it would.
This book is better suited for a person that needs a pep-talk into leaping forward, or just needing inspiration, maybe not for someone that is actually trying to build a strategy for their life. More like you are crying in the bathroom at a bar because some person was a bit of an ass, and your new best friend (who you met maybe 20 minutes ago and is as drunk as you are) is there to hype you up to get you back on that dance floor.
Final Thoughts:
Not an awful book to start with, but not going to be the crowning entry either. I’ll probably move towards more books that are a bit more strategy heavy, but are still written by women and people who identify as female as I appreciated the female entrepreneur perspective and interviews.