When Elizabeth Keenan was 16, hundreds of protesters from all over the country descended on her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They spent a week outside the city’s only abortion clinic, Delta Women’s Care, in hopes of forcing it to close.

That 1992 protest sets the scene for Keenan’s debut YA novel, Rebel Girls (Inkyard Press). Athena and Helen Graves may only be one year apart in age, but they’re about as different as sisters can be. Athena is an aspiring riot grrrl who loves The Clash and Hillary Clinton, while Helen was head of her middle school’s anti-abortion club and dreams of being a model. Nonetheless, when Helen starts acting strangely, Athena is determined to get to the bottom of her sister’s sudden personality change. She eventually discovers that mean girl Leah has been spreading rumors that Helen had an abortion—strictly forbidden at their conservative Catholic school.

To fight back, Athena and Helen recruit a team of girls for a guerrilla propaganda campaign. The patches and buttons the girls create were inspired by the riot grrrl movement. Before turning to fiction, Keenan was an academic studying music and feminism in the 1990s and spent a lot of time at the riot grrrl collection in NYU’s library. “There’s all these amazing letters and diary entries and fanzines that are written in this amazing bubbly language that’s really super enthusiastic about music, about life. But then on the other hand, they’re always talking about these really heavy topics,” Keenan says. A dry academic book could never capture that voice, but a YA novel certainly could.

Keenan admits that riot grrrl left a lot to be desired as a feminist movement, but it was a perfect fit for Athena’s character. “Its politics are very obvious and really teen-oriented,” she says. “It’s also at times really contradictory.” How do you support other women when they’re determined to make your life miserable? Where’s the line between standing up for yourself and tearing someone else down?

“One of the main things in the book that I want people to get out of it is having a sense of empathy for people whose views you don’t agree with—you may never agree with—but you can still feel that that other person who has that very different political view from you is a human,” Keenan says.

Basically, it’s much easier to call yourself a feminist than to actually be one—and that’s the heart of Athena’s journey. “You can have ideals,” Keenan says, “but you also have to live them.”

Alex Heimbach is a writer and editor in California.