After reading the utterly vile I'm With Stupid, I needed a break from idiocy and lunged for some science. I was worried at first that Pink Brain, Blue Brain would be more of the same, tired "there are differences between boys and girls, get over it!" that I've seen so many times in the past. To my relief, the author emphasized that while there are differences (and there are!), the vast majority of them are not statistically significant (for the non-scientifically minded, that's like the difference between something that costs $99 and something that costs $100) and that problems come more from the social side of things than the genetic or hormonal. That was a breath of fresh air.

It isn't a perfect book, however; there are a few points that are unnecessarily repetitive, and as another reviewer has mentioned, some of her advice is so generic as to be pointless. In a few places the prose breaks down a little bit, but not in any major way and not enough to detract from the book as a whole. On a more troubling note is the author's frequent use of sexist language and some sweeping generalizations (girls "love" to gossip for example and boys don't, she claims, when sociologists find that in fact men and women gossip in equal measures, the major difference being that women are willing to refer to it as gossip where men generally are not). These struck me as out of place in an otherwise well-written and remarkably unbiased book.