Will I love The Girls Next Door?

Kara Vuic gives us the story of young women who went to war—not those in the uniforms of military service, but those who were sent to help boost morale of the men who fought and to remind them of the homes they’d left behind.

She’s keenly aware of the complications and contradictions in the roles the women were expected to fulfill, and of the emotional toll of their work, but she also offers us a sense of their spirit of adventure and a glimpse of the more intimate aspects of 20th century US wars.

Kara Vuic can tell a story! Her highly readable volume unearths the experiences of the tens of thousands of women who volunteered to sing, dance, play games, and break bread with soldiers throughout US military deployments of the 20th century. Enlisted by the military to keep up troop morale, women were sent to far-flung theaters of war, and served in every deployment from World War I through Iraq and Afghanistan. Vuic teaches us how the military saw these “girls next door” as essential to encouraging men to fight, providing a fantasy of the American gendered dream — a girlfriend or… show more.