The agenda for research into gender and literacy is reset in this book by focusing on the social organization of literacy in schools rather than on gender. For Moss, the most important influence on children’s development as readers is their encounter with schooled literacy and what this means within their peer networks and communities.

Using fine-grained ethnographic data on reading curriculum in English primary schools, Moss asserts that the reading curriculum, with its explicit and implicit emphases on reading for proficiency, constructs a hierarchy of learners in the classroom. As boys and girls assume their perceived positions as readers, they follow different paths through the reading curriculum. The social constructions of literacy and gender identities intertwine, as students chose texts on the basis of the social possibilities those texts represent.

In the first two chapters, Moss situates her argument as extending current feminist perspectives on gender inequalities in attainment by using research tools associated with sociocultural approaches to literacy. In chapter 3, Moss uses the concept of the literacy event to examine what counts as reading for the participants in her study as she examines their genre preferences. Chapters 4 and 5 look at relationships between the contexts for reading and texts chosen in these contexts. Moss looks specifically at official uses of nonfiction texts, at their layout choices, and then at how her participants remade and recontextualized these texts for their own purposes. In the final chapter, Moss considers the pedagogical implications of the findings and places them in the context of current curriculum reform efforts in England.

Although I would have liked to see more attention to the range of gender identities constructed within the classroom, this work makes an important contribution to gender and literacy debates. Future research would do well to apply Moss’ findings to different grade levels, literacy curricula, and cultural contexts.