Stewart also provides some light history on the founder of the Girl Scouts, Juliette Gordon Low, and the author's discussions of the backgrounds of friends at the shelter who helped Giselle illuminate themes of empowerment and overcoming personal challenges.
an accessible narrative that encompasses a range of social justice concerns. One unintended result is that, in a book illuminating the life-changing power of scouting, none of the girls in Troop 6000 wind up being nearly as memorable for a reader as Giselle Burgess and several other adults. She splinters her book into 26 chapters and each chapter into multiple scenes she flits from character to character, event to event, often failing to build depth or sustain narrative drive. How does one accurately depict incessant disorder without the writing itself turning disorderly? Stewart has not solved that problem.
dutifully describes the Cinderella episodes the girls and parents of Troop 6000 enjoy, but she refuses to avert her eyes from their precarious lives. But in my decades of experience, I have never encountered a more nettlesome example than Troop 6000. Any journalist or author who practices immersion reporting has to worry about the effect of his, her, or their presence on the subjects and events being observed. What would have been the more normal, gradual and genuine effort to build and maintain a Girl Scout troop in extremis was overwhelmed by its instant vogue.
Troop 6000 was only several months into existence at that point. Yet Stewart also has to struggle with the result of her own article. She problematizes the myth, relentlessly returning to the debilitating chaos of homelessness itself. To her great credit, Stewart has too much integrity and clarity to go along with the fairy-tale version of Troop 6000’s experience. Indeed, the publisher has packaged this book as a feel-good yarn, complete with a hyperbolic subtitle about how the homeless girls 'inspired the world'. I do not mean in any way to diminish Stewart’s impressive journalistic skills when I wonder if this book would have existed without the boldface-name buzz that Troop 6000 received.
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