3.5 stars, rounding up for how many interviews were here. 

This was a slow start -- it took me nearly halfway to really hit the flow -- because it completely lacked any background or contextualization by the authors/compilers. I love oral histories, but unless you're coming in with a solid knowledge of the topic already, this is a challenging entry. My knowledge consisted of growing up listening to a Philadelphia oldies station that played almost all Motown and girl groups... so enough to be like, yes I love this song, it's the Shirelles or whoever. But that's it, basically I knew the songs and the group names and nothing else. It's also very long. Once I hit halfway, though, I had picked up enough context that I was totally invested. 

I haven't put all my thoughts in order yet about the content: there is so much here to unpack. They were SO YOUNG. the pieces about how these girls were exploited, the dynamics of race and gender and power, the geography and how that played into those dynamics... there is a lot here. I understand why the (white, Jewish, mixed-race white/Asian) authors wanted to remove themselves from the story in order to have the girls at the center, their voices unquestionably primary, and I can see how perhaps the lack of background and context stemmed from that. I'm not sure it worked, because all of the pieces and power dynamics and history are so complex and interrelated that to rely on the reader to do that unpacking and critical historical work is risky. But I get the impulse.