Rebranding Samantha: Reflections on the First “Grown Up” American Girl Book

We had several things on our 40th anniversary of American Girl wishlist: The relaunch of Grin Pins; a new historical doll with a more contemporary history (we have consistently suggested something from the 1960s Chicano Movement); a few updated Smart Girl’s guides (please help us with our taxes, American Girl!). What we never imagined—even in our wildest prepubescent or current grown-up dreams—was an American Girl novel for adults. On February 11th, 2026, American Girl announced that they would be releasing their first book aimed explicitly at adults, focusing on Samantha Parkington.

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The question of how to engage—and profit from—a grown-up audience is not new in the age of the internet. Time is elastic; nothing truly disappears online, and you can sink yourself into the hazy nostalgia of your childhood at a moment’s notice. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media strained under the weight of those returning to their parents’ home and cleaning out the closets of their former bedrooms. Admissions to American Girl’s “doll hospital” surged; at least one of us (Justine) can attest to finding her formative Molly McIntire doll in the back of her old closet with rumpled hair and a loose arm, and promptly utilizing her adult credit card to get her fixed.

In 2025, we published An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe, in part because of the swell of reconnection we witnessed across our social media feeds, but also to satisfy our academic curiosities as scholars with titles and credentials who felt American Girl had played a role in our respective career trajectories. Dr. Tara Strauch, writing for our book, mused over the so-called “Felicity Generation”: women raised on American Girl characters, books, and accessory lines who ultimately became historians (or pursued higher education and academia more broadly). That American Girl has helped foster an interest in the past while shaping futures is both undeniable and laudable.

An “official” update to Samantha’s story doesn’t preclude headcanons. But it does narrow the scope of possibility, just a little.

Over the course of creating the anthology, we worked with a dozen writers covering topics as diverse as Asian-American representation within the brand to adult collectors and the AGIG (American Girl Instagram) community to the proliferation of “tag-yourself” memes about American Girl characters reaching the mainstream. One throughline that touched almost every essay was the question of nostalgia. Nostalgia has two components: the warmth that you feel as you step back, even for the briefest second, into a moment that has passed, but also a necessarily bitter twin–the knowledge that the moment has passed, and you cannot truly return.

Ultimately, American Girl still has to walk a fine line between being a profitable brand and  remaining—and enduring as—a safe brand for children who are still learning to navigate the world. So what does American Girl and Pleasant Company owe their fans over the age of twelve?

Samantha is, in our eyes, the logical choice for this somewhat illogical project: she is one of the first three dolls created by Pleasant Rowland; she has commanded a reputation as the doll with the best stuff (evidenced by her rumored status as American Girl’s best-selling doll of all time); American Girl’s 2026 Doll of the Year, Raquel Reyes, is, according to the company, Samantha’s  direct descendant. Moreover, though Samantha’s original book series sees her confront the harsh realities of child labor, her storyline has (relative to others) at least somewhat less friction.

American Girl is keeping Samantha: The Next Chapter under strict lock-and-key; at time of writing, no advanced reader copies appear to be circulating, and only the first four chapters are available for review via Cosmopolitan.com (there’s something to be said for American Girl choosing to release this preview via a magazine platform that once attempted to straddle adolescence and maturity with a brand new creation: the Cosmo Girl). Both American Girl and author Fiona Davis (who has penned seven bestselling historical fiction novels involving New York City and its architecture) describe the book this way:

It’s 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them to vote in their first presidential election that fall. But when Samantha’s large inheritance, including her childhood Mount Bedford home, is stolen in a shocking scheme, she goes from socialite to shopgirl overnight and experiences a very different side of New York City.

Let us state what we hope is obvious: we did not (and do not) have expectations of grand deviations from American Girl’s general script. Samantha Parkington is a trademarked character, and American Girl has a brand reputation they are invested in preserving and protecting. There isn’t a world in which Mattel, who now owns and manages Pleasant Company, would canonically endorse Samantha joining the IWW. But it is disappointingly clear that American Girl isn’t really comfortable with engaging adult readers on their level (reading or otherwise) in any meaningful capacity.

Despite its description, Samantha: The Next Chapter is a young adult novel. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s simply not how the book has been marketed or peddled. The opening beats are so carefully constrained within the established patter and reading level of the original texts that you would be forgiven for thinking Samantha Parkington is twelve, not twenty-five. In case you had forgotten Samantha in doll form comes with a heart-shaped locket, it is mentioned immediately (along with her dark brown hair, where she grew up, that she’s a suffragist, and, for good measure, what exactly a suffragist is). Children require exposition; good children’s literature helps them learn to draw their own conclusions and appreciate patterns and connections. Adults should, by any metric, be able to pick up on subtext. Especially adults reading through a nostalgic lens who grew up with this same character over the past 40 years.

Samantha Parkington stood near the back, where she could see everything. She wore her dark brown hair pinned neatly at the nape, smooth and practical. She ran a hand over it, catching a rebellious curl on the verge of escape and tucking it back in place. She was twenty-five now, and she had work to do…She touched the heart-shaped locket that held photos of her parents and always steadied her before she gave a speech. She wanted to do her part to encourage women to vote, because turnout for previous elections had been disheartening for suffragists. They might have secured the right to vote for the women of New York but that didn’t mean women knew how—or were ready—to use it.

One Redditor put it: “I guess I don’t necessarily mind being pandered to, but I found this KIND of pandering…annoying.”

Fiona Davis has undoubtedly delivered precisely the kind of manuscript American Girl desired, and moreover, felt comfortable stamping their approval on. We can only imagine the dozens of conversations that hammered out precisely what a twenty-five year old Samantha Parkington could say and do. There’s precedent for this kind of back-and-forth, and it doesn’t always end with new material; consider the aborted (and much anticipated) Lizzie McGuire reboot, in which the once-preteen would be navigating adult life in New York City. The project collapsed after Disney, who owns the rights to once-and-future Lizzie content, made it clear to both creator Terri Minsky and star Hilary Duff that the character’s experiences as a 30-year old woman would need to remain within the bounds of a PG-rating. Even Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder struggled to render her own adult experiences (marriage, childbirth) for an audience that understood her as a perpetual child, which is almost certainly why The First Four Years was published posthumously (Justine has never managed to forget Wilder’s terrifyingly short summation of her own labor and delivery: “She was being borne away on a wave of pain”).

Still, in reading the first four chapters available, it is hard to get a clear sense of what genre-related guardrails felt most important to American Girl. Word count-wise, the chapters on Cosmo clock in between 1,450 to 2,000 words, which is the exact range for a young adult novel. While readers aren’t likely counting up words while reading, chapter length contributes greatly to pacing and development. Then again, Samantha’s age in the text effectively kicks her out of acceptable ranges for a YA novel, which typically features main characters between twelve and eighteen years old. Even more baffling is that American Girl already includes age categories as a method for filtering books on its website. Selecting “Books for Adults” aggregates a wide range of books from the American Girl Character Encyclopedia (Ages 6+) to The Official American Girl Cookbook (Ages 21+, because it includes recipes for alcoholic beverages), as adults can read at all levels. Further aligning with reader maturity, the New York Times Bestseller The Care & Keeping of You has been split into two books for younger (Ages 8-10) and older girls (Ages 10+), saving more specific details about “the bumpy road known as puberty” for the second volume. The sole book without an age rating (though it does pop up at the top of the “Books for Adults” page) is Samantha: The Next Chapter. Presumably the brand assumes the description—which begins with the words “Adult fans”—correctly emphasizes the ideal reader.

American Girl gave their primary audience the skills to grow as readers. So why is their ostensible foray into the world of adult fiction so… juvenile?

This book also debuts at a time when the landscape of the adult romance genre is experiencing a monumental shift. Readers, predominantly women, are adamant in their desire to read books about female character growth and explicit pleasure (known in the online book communities as “spice”). Certainly not all Adult or even New Adult novels incorporate explicit sexual content, but American Girl’s choice to align this book with adult readers, rather than Young Adult, inevitably raises the question: what kind of adult material will this book contain? The opportunity to contextualize 20th-century feminine health and hygiene is obvious (will Samantha use a sanitary belt or have to navigate accusations of female hysteria?!) and well within the brand’s previous publishing scope. While the description for the new book doesn’t mention love, one can assume that a twenty-five year old Samantha, an Edwardian-era socialite no less, will inevitably navigate some romantic aspect or at least turn down a strictly-business marriage proposal or two sent her way via a meddling Grandmary.

Since their debut in 1986, American Girl has shrunk their historical line significantly–including paring down the traditional six-book set for each historical character into two streamlined texts. This has been much lamented by those who came to the brand through its commitment to fully realizing American girlhood through history.

American Girl gave their primary audience the skills to grow as readers. So why is their ostensible foray into the world of adult fiction so… juvenile? Beyond the expected restrictions of original intellectual property, there is something to be said for the moment in which this nostalgic-driven cash grab finds its audience: many Americans struggle to read above a sixth grade reading level. This is not something individuals should feel ashamed of, but it does lay stark the difference between the America Samantha Parkington debuted in and the one she (for $175) occupies now. American Girl has always positioned itself as a partner in children’s literacy, intending the books aimed at middle and lower grades to be stepping stones to more challenging works with time, maturity, and education level, and filling shelves in grade school libraries across the nation for their attention to age-appropriate writing. Of course, there are plenty of grown-ups KC included) who prefer reading YA for its themes, writing styles, or simply out of nostalgia. But in trying to explicitly court adult fans in this particular medium, something is lost.

Over the last few years, the American Girl brand has made more explicit overtures to their fully-grown fanbase: in 2021, American Girl announced the return of their original six-doll lineup (Samantha, Kirsten,  Molly, Josefina, Felicity, and Addy). As part of the promotion, they also released a short book described as “for adults” in press coverage, entitled “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from American Girl” (this book is rated for ages 8+ on the website). The brand has benefited from both unaffiliated and adjacent adult engagement with the company, too: the rise of Instagram meme accounts (hundreds of thousands of likes for an image of Felicity Merriman photoshopped onto Paul Revere’s body, shouting “Dick Cheney is Dead”); the ability to purchase alcohol at the American Girl Place cafés across the country (you can have your bachelorette party there!); collaboration after exhausting collaboration with other cultural juggernauts (Harry Potter; Barbie in her decidedly mature black bathing suit).

Over the course of researching (and touring) our anthology, we encountered dozens of fans who engage in a practice known as “restorying”—a term that comes to us from the world of folklore and social narrative. For people who did not see themselves reflected in the official storylines of the original characters, restorying allows fans to see a myriad of “off-script” futures. Within your imagination, Kit could start a communist underground zine, Rebecca Rubin could have a more robust engagement with Jewish practices, and Molly could come out of the closet (or end up in prison, if you believe the ongoing joke arc from Instagram meme account @grandmarys_nightmare). An “official” update to Samantha’s story doesn’t preclude headcanons. But it does narrow the scope of possibility, just a little. Undoubtedly, there will be plenty of readers who embrace Samantha: the Next Chapter for exactly what it is intended as: a bone, thrown on the occasion of the brand’s fortieth year in business.