But if a book with “girl” in the title was written by a man, the girl is significantly more likely to end up dead. A number of patterns emerged in our analysis: The “girl” in the title is much more likely to be a woman than an actual girl, and the author of the book is more likely to be a woman. Using the database at Goodreads, the popular social networking website for readers, we set out to change that. Other people have written about this trend, often with great eloquence, but none of them were backed by a data set. Who are these girls? Why are there so many of them? Books with “girl” in the titles make up a tiny fraction of all the books published in a given year, but they appear again and again on the bestseller lists. Carl Hiaasen’s “Razor Girl” recently hit The New York Times bestseller list. This summer belonged to “The Girls,” Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel, still prominently displayed in every bookstore I enter. Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” was equally ubiquitous a couple of years back. the actual number is undoubtedly much higher, because that number doesn’t capture eBook sales - and box-office receipts for the film adaptation reached nearly $25 million in its opening weekend. Paula Hawkins’s debut, “The Girl on the Train,” was published last year and is still everywhere: Nielsen BookScan reports 2.7 million copies have been sold in the U.S. More recently, we seem to have entered the age of the girls. Bookshelf upon bookshelf was filled with the daughters of generals, cartographers, lacemakers, lighthouse keepers, veterinarians, preachers and miscreants. There was a time a few years back when it seemed to me that about every third book I encountered was called “The X’s Daughter,” with X standing in for just about any occupation, title, rank and pejorative imaginable.
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