Deconstructing September Girls with Bennett Madison
Bennett Madison's September Girls, published by HarperTeen in April 2013, arrived in the YA market as something genuinely unusual: a novel written by a man, narrated by a teenage boy, about a beach town full of mysterious blonde girls, that set out to examine — rather than simply reproduce — the male gaze. The premise is a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's original Little Mermaid, stripped of the Disney gloss and restored to its darker original terms: sacrifice, transformation, the conditional nature of belonging, and the violence done to girls who want things the world refuses to give them. The novel generated discussion in the YA community that was disproportionate to its commercial performance, partly because the central question it raised — can a novel make objectification visible by deploying it, or does deployment reproduce the problem regardless of intent? — is one of the more genuinely interesting literary-critical questions that YA fiction has raised in the last decade.
This editorial analysis examines September Girls as a literary object: its narrative mechanics, its engagement with the source myth, the specific devices it uses to position the reader relative to the narrator's perspective, and the critical debate it generated. The goal is not to adjudicate whether the novel succeeds or fails on its own terms, but to map the terms accurately enough that readers can evaluate their own response with clarity.
The novel's premise begins with a family in dissolution. Sam's mother has left without adequate explanation, and his father, a man managing depression through a combination of whisky and inappropriate cheerfulness, decides that what the family needs is a road trip to a beach town where his own father once vacationed. Sam and his older brother Jeff accompany him to a coastal community where something is immediately, persistently strange: the town is populated by beautiful blonde girls, all of whom are named Dee, all of whom exist in a state of slightly out-of-focus temporal suspension. They are there in summer and not in summer, like the beach itself.
The Little Mermaid mythology is present from early in the novel but is not explained mechanically — it operates more as an atmosphere than a plot architecture. The Dee girls are not mermaids in the sense of having fish tails; they are something more unspecified, caught between a condition they were born into and one they are trying to reach. The price of reaching it, as in Andersen, involves sacrifice: voice, agency, or selfhood in some combination that the novel does not fully specify but persistently implies. Sam is drawn into this mythology partly because he falls for one of the Dee girls, and partly because the mythology provides him with a language for processes he does not have other words for.
The Male Gaze as Narrative Device
The most discussed formal feature of September Girls is its deployment of male gaze narration as a subject of analysis rather than — or in addition to — a mode of storytelling. Sam notices and describes female bodies persistently and in detail throughout the novel. This is presented as a feature of his character rather than incidental narration: the book is interested in Sam's noticing, in what he sees and how he frames it, as evidence of a pattern that the reader is invited to observe from the outside while simultaneously experiencing from the inside.
The literary device this most closely resembles is the unreliable narrator — a narrating consciousness whose account of events the reader is structurally invited to distrust, or to supplement with information the narrator lacks or suppresses. In novels like Nabokov's Lolita or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, the unreliable narrator's blind spots are the actual subject of the novel; the reader's work is to perceive what the narrator cannot or will not see. Madison's project in September Girls is in this tradition: Sam is not a villain but a lens, and the lens has a distortion that the reader is meant to see.
Where the critical debate began was on the question of whether the device was handled with sufficient precision to make this double reading — simultaneously inside Sam's perspective and critical of it — consistently achievable for the novel's target readership. The School Library Journal's starred review argued yes: that Madison managed the balance between subjective narration and authorial critique throughout, and that the novel constituted a genuine and valuable feminist intervention in the YA tradition of male-narrated beach novels. A significant minority of YA bloggers argued that the extended passages of physical description, regardless of their intended function, were uncomfortable to read; that the critical distance the novel theoretically established was insufficient in practice to change the phenomenological experience of inhabiting Sam's gaze; and that the novel's value as critique did not adequately compensate for the experience of reading it.
"Can a novel make objectification visible by deploying it, or does deployment reproduce the problem regardless of intent? This is one of the more genuinely interesting questions YA fiction has raised."
— Novel Sounds editorialThe Andersen Source and What the Retelling Changes
Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," published in 1837, is a substantially darker text than its Disney adaptation. The mermaid is not given a happy ending: she sacrifices her voice, endures pain with every step on her new legs, is not chosen by the prince, and ultimately faces the choice between killing him and dissolving into sea foam — with the threat of damnation in some translations. Andersen's mermaid is a figure defined by deprivation: she gives up everything for access to a world that will not fully receive her, and she cannot return to the world she came from.
Madison's retelling preserves the structure of deprivation and failed transformation while relocating it within the social machinery of adolescence. The Dee girls are not supernatural in the baroque sense that Andersen's mermaid is supernatural; they are uncanny in the more specifically literary sense — familiar but wrongly placed, operating under rules that are the rules of the recognizable world but subtly distorted. What they are trying to escape is not an underwater kingdom but a condition of female existence, and what they need to escape it is not a prince's love but a human's recognition. The retelling's thesis, visible in this substitution, is that Andersen's myth is not about mermaids specifically but about what it costs girls to want access to a world not designed to want them back.
The novel also deploys the myth self-consciously — Sam learns about it gradually, in fragments, from a girl who knows more than she is supposed to say. This creates a structural parallel to the mermaid's lost voice: the Dee girls know things they cannot fully communicate, and the novel is partly about the cost of that constraint. The asymmetry of knowledge between Sam (who narrates) and the Dee girls (who know but cannot fully speak) is itself a version of the myth's central dynamic.
Bennett Madison's Earlier Work and Development
Madison's debut, Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (2005), was a comic YA mystery with a strong, confident female protagonist voice, narrated in first person with sharp wit and considerable self-awareness. The contrast between Lulu's assured voice and Sam's in September Girls is notable: where Lulu narrates with complete control over her own story, Sam is a narrator who is consistently outpaced by what is happening to and around him. This is a deliberate construction rather than a failure of craft — the male narrator who cannot see what the female characters see is structurally central to September Girls' project.
The Blonde of the Joke (2009) explored female friendship and delinquency in a dual-narrated structure. Like September Girls, it is interested in the social performances adolescents enact and in the costs of those performances to the performers. The beach novel shares with The Blonde of the Joke an interest in the specific cruelties of summer — the way the temporary social world of the holiday site exaggerates and accelerates the dynamics of ordinary adolescent life.
The Critical Reception and What It Reveals
The critical split around September Girls is instructive about a broader tension in literary YA criticism. The novel received its strongest endorsements from critics who engaged with it as a literary project — measuring it against its own stated intentions and finding the execution adequate. It received its most critical notices from readers who engaged with it as an experience — measuring it against the experience of reading it, regardless of intent, and finding the experience uncomfortable.
These are not the same evaluative standard, and the debate around the novel is partly a debate about which standard should apply. The literary-critical tradition strongly favors intentionality: a novel that intends to critique objectification and deploys the technical apparatus to do so is, on this view, a different thing from one that objectifies without critique, even if the surface-level content is similar. The reader-experience tradition — which is particularly strong in YA criticism, where the relationship between text and young reader is taken as ethically significant — argues that the experience of reading matters independently of what the author intended, and that a young reader encountering Sam's gaze is still encountering Sam's gaze, frame or no frame.
What makes September Girls a productive text for this debate rather than merely an illustration of it is that it does not resolve the tension. It is a novel that has made a literary argument and also produced an experience, and the two are genuinely in tension. Readers who found the literary argument compelling were still reading the experience; readers who found the experience uncomfortable were still inside a novel making a serious argument. The inability to neatly separate them is, arguably, what makes the book more interesting than most YA of its year.
Mermaid Mythology in Contemporary YA
The mermaid as a YA subject has a specific cultural logic. Mermaids are creatures defined by liminality — between sea and land, between human and non-human, between belonging and exclusion — which maps naturally onto the adolescent experience of occupying thresholds. They are also creatures whose defining transformation (legs for a tail, or vice versa) involves bodily change and the social consequences of that change, which has obvious resonances with puberty narratives.
In the YA market of the early 2010s, mermaid fiction occupied a middle ground between the paranormal romance boom (vampires, werewolves, fallen angels) and the more purely contemporary strand. Anna Banks's Of Poseidon (2012), the most commercially successful mermaid YA of the period, leaned toward romance with supernatural infrastructure; its mermaids had elaborate powers and social hierarchies, and the human girl protagonist's entry into that world followed romance-novel conventions closely. Madison's choice to use the Andersen source rather than romance conventions — to treat the myth as a structure for examining gender dynamics rather than as a backdrop for a love story — placed September Girls in a smaller category of literary mermaid fiction, alongside work like Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber in spirit, even if not in age range.
The novel's place in mermaid YA is now, a decade after publication, fairly settled: it is considered a literary outlier within the genre, more formally ambitious than most of its contemporaries, generating more critical discussion than commercial success, and remaining of interest to readers and critics attracted to YA that uses genre machinery to do literary work.
Frequently Asked Questions
September Girls is a 2013 YA novel published by HarperTeen. It follows Sam, a teenage boy whose mother has recently left the family, who travels with his father and older brother to a beach town on the outer coast. The town is populated by mysterious blonde girls who all go by the name Dee. The novel is a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's original Little Mermaid, using its male narrator's perspective to examine how young men perceive and narrate the girls around them.
Bennett Madison is an American YA author whose work includes Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (2005), Lulu Dark and the Summer of the Fox (2006), and The Blonde of the Joke (2009). September Girls (2013) generated the most significant critical discussion of his career. His fiction is generally characterized by sharp dialogue, unreliable narrators, and sustained interest in the social codes of adolescent life.
This was the central point of critical debate around the book. Some reviewers argued it is fundamentally a feminist text — that the male narrator's objectifying gaze is presented as critique rather than endorsement, with the novel structurally exposing the inadequacy of Sam's perception. Others found extended passages of objectifying description uncomfortable to read regardless of authorial intent, arguing that the critical frame did not adequately compensate for the reading experience.
The novel is a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's original tale — not the 1989 Disney adaptation. In Andersen's story, the mermaid sacrifices her voice for legs, is not chosen by the prince, and dissolves into sea foam. Madison's beach town operates on a variant of this mythology: the Dee girls are trapped between sea and shore, pursuing escape from their condition through a relationship with a human male. The parallels are structural rather than literal, with the myth used as a framework for examining gender and sacrifice.
The novel generated extensive discussion because it presented a male narrator whose perspective was explicitly sexualizing toward the female characters while asking readers to simultaneously inhabit that perspective and recognize it critically. Readers divided between those who found the critical distance sufficient to land the book's feminist argument, and those who found the experience of sustained objectification uncomfortable regardless of the theoretical frame — a debate that touched on questions of intentionality, audience, and what literary technique can compensate for in reading experience.
YA mermaid fiction includes Anna Banks's Of Poseidon (2012), which is primarily a romance with supernatural infrastructure; Rae Carson's water-deity mythology in The Girl of Fire and Thorns; and Liz Braswell's Part of Your World (2018), an official Disney Little Mermaid retelling in the Twisted Tales series. For literary treatment of the Andersen source specifically, September Girls remains one of the more formally ambitious reworkings in the YA category.
The male gaze, theorized by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 film essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," describes the tendency in media to present subjects — particularly women — through a perspective that assumes a male viewer, framing female characters as objects of observation rather than subjects with agency. In YA fiction the concept applies to novels in which male narrators describe female characters primarily in physical terms. September Girls is unusual in that it deploys the male gaze as a literary subject rather than simply reproducing it.
Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls is Bennett Madison's 2005 debut YA novel, a comic mystery narrated by Lulu Dark — a fashion-conscious teenager whose purse containing her identity is stolen, prompting an investigation. The novel is narrated with self-aware wit and considered an early example of the voice-driven YA mystery subgenre. A sequel, Lulu Dark and the Summer of the Fox, followed in 2006. Both are out of print but available secondhand.
September Girls received a starred review from School Library Journal and positive notices from publications that read it as a successful literary experiment in exposing male objectification through first-person narration. The YA blogging community was more divided — a significant minority found the book's intent insufficient to counterbalance the discomfort of inhabiting its narrator's perspective. Kirkus noted its ambition while flagging the tension between technique and effect. The novel did not achieve wide commercial success but maintains discussion among readers interested in literary YA.
September Girls was published as a hardcover by HarperTeen in April 2013, with a paperback edition following. Availability varies — the title is out of print in some markets but remains accessible secondhand through online booksellers and in library systems. Readers interested in the novel are most likely to find it through library catalogues or used book platforms.