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Scholarly Reviews:

"One of the book's greatest strengths lies in its engagement with visual figuration. The introduction's subtitle, "Portrait of a Girl and a Fabric Seller," accompanies Alexandre d'Albéca's 1895 photograph "Une marchande de tissus," placed opposite the text. The discussionbegins with an analysis of the image and the broader context of colonial photographers, who produced ethnographic "types" for European audiences. Nearly every chapter opens with lithographs or photographs of girls. Reuther treats these not as mere illustrations but as deliberate interventions confronting archival silences. They function both heuristically and interpretively, inviting new ways of reading the record. She interprets them as co-creations, collaborations between photographers and subjects, attending closely to framing, posture and gaze. The images turn attention not to their viewers but back to the girls themselves."

Reviewed by Dr. Dominique Somda (Kalamazoo College) in Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines

"The book never loses sight of individual actors, building wolrds around the brief appearance of girls in the historical record. This is an engaging history through which to understand traditions of child dependency in coastal West African kingdoms profoundly afffected by global transformations from the 18th through 20th centuries."

Dr. Sarah J. Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire

"In a convincing way, the book argues that the changing political economy of precolonial as well as colonial Dahomey over the last three centuries could not be understood without taking the important role of various practices of child circulation into account, for large parts of the economy - first in slave trading, later in the palm oil economy - are intensively reliant on girls labor....This is a real new and groundbreaking approach that binds the too often separate sphere of childhood and kinship convincingly together with that of politics and transformations of power and wealth."

Dr. Erdmute Alber, author of Transfers of Belonging: Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century