A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls by Adam Morgan
An intriguing look at the world of little magazines, censorship, and the literary whirlpool of change during the 1920s and 1930s. Margaret Anderson was a likely candidate for being a literary catalyst, but a catalyst and adventurer she was. A woman who lived life on her own terms, taking lovers and all the risks of publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses. For anyone interested in women’s history, publishing history, or looking at cultural changes.
A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls by Adam Morgan, (List Price: $29, Atria / One Signal Publishers, 9781668053645, December 2025)
Reviewed by Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books in Davidson, North Carolina
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“I worked on a gubernatorial campaign in high school and fell hard for the drama and passion that surround elections. Nostalgic for shows like The West Wing and Scandal, I began weaving together an unlikely love story between opposing candidates forced to confront their past…This novel is about the experiences that bind us together and the differences that tear us apart as two people navigate the tension between love and ambition…To be loved is to be seen but for Tess and Grant, the person they love sees the world very differently.
“[It’s] often not what you get around stories that involve African Americans. Most of us cannot trace our histories all the way back to a slave ship or to a particular country in Africa because the records of the enslaved were not recorded in detail. So it’s incredible and very powerful that these descendants know the actual stories of their ancestors that came from Africa.
I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, How amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed 1000s of years ago, and I can still see him, and we can learn so much about him and his life, from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved, and I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them. One day, I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it’s still breathtaking to see, and there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs, and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the non human world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the earth, but there are many other organisms here that have huge impact on us, in our lives, and I really wanted to share that too. 
