What Girls Are Good For

A Novel of Nellie Bly

By: David Blixt

Narrated by: Janice L. Blixt

From international best-selling author David Blixt: Nellie Bly has the story of a lifetime. But will she survive to tell it?

Enraged by a sexist article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Elizabeth Cochrane pens a furious letter to the editor that results in a job offer! Saddled with the name Nellie Bly, she struggles against the male-dominated newspaper industry to report what no one else will—stories of women.

Chased out of Mexico for revealing government corruption, her romantic advances rejected by a married colleague, Bly can break into New York’s Newspaper Row if she can nab a major scoop—life inside a madhouse! Feigning madness, she is committed to the Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, where matters are far worse than she dreamed. Stripped, drugged, beaten, she must endure a week of terror, reliving the darkest days of her childhood. She must escape to tell the world her story. But at the end of a week, no rescue comes, and she fears she may be trapped forever....

Ripped from the true events of Nellie Bly’s life and reporting comes a novel of rage, determination, and triumph, all in the frame of a tiny Pennsylvania spitfire who refused to let the world change her, and changed the world instead.

©2018 David Blixt (P)2022 David Blixt

Critic reviews

"With rich imagination and meticulous research, David Blixt has brought the hectic, exciting world of nineteenth-century journalism vividly to life. His Nellie Bly is determined, independent, crafty, irresistible—a heroine any reader would be delighted to get to know." (Matthew Goodman, Eighty Days)

"David Blixt pens a heroine for the ages in What Girls Are Good For. This real-life Lois Lane had me cheering aloud as I turned the pages—simply a delight!" (Kate Quinn, The Alice Network)

"Dramatic, engrossing, and spirited! A feminist icon whose voice rings loud and true!" (Olivia Hawker, The Ragged Edge of Night)

Can't say enough about this book

I recently finished the audiobook and thoroughly enjoyed D. Blixt's alliterative writing style as well as J. Blixt's powerhouse performance (an amazing range of voices, songs, and snarkiness throughout). Reminiscent of Jo March, readers will fall in love with and root for our protagonist as she struggles to make a name for herself (pun intended - you'll get it when you read it) in the late 1800s as a reporter. Fighting for herself as well as many of the downtrodden of her time, Bly must make her way through the "men's sphere" of journalism work to prove her voice is worth listening to. Adventure, romance, and more are abound in this novel, which is even more interesting to me since I teach a brief section about Bly's investigative reporting in my journalism class. The author thoroughly cements the reader in the attitudes and workings of the time period while crafting Bly's exuberance and determination to buck the system and prove exactly what girls are good for. I highly recommend this rollicking novel, and I look forward to her other adventures in this series.