These Waves of Girls is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play, and lesbian sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections, and meditations from the point of view of a girl (or girls) at various ages from four to twenty. Fisher's work is distinct for its hypermedia features: each text passage is illustrated by a different image and presented through a unique interface; some passages are read aloud by the author. The character's sexual self-construction is figured in the hypertextual structure. The reader witnesses the characters' identity construction from one link to the next, coming closer to what identity means to the stories' characters—neither a fixed place in society nor a stable self-identification, but a fluidity we all, potentially, can relate to: "We've all been fifteen. I look very much the same, only at fifteen I'm a little larger, a little stronger. I'll believe anything. I tell people I believe nothing."
(Patricia Tomaszek)
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Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls is an electronic hypertext resolving around the issues of sexuality, memory and the transition from girldhood to adolescence. Fisher is writing about the experiences of particular girls during their primary school years and their experimentation with sexual explorations. Fisher employs sounds, written text and images to compose her hypertext, and in this respect her work is considered multimodal. These Waves of Girls is an interactive work, as the reader clicks on the hyperlinks to move the story. As an electronic hypertext, These Waves of Girls falls into the steps of first and second generation hypertexts such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. In These Waves of Girls, Fisher brings the hypetext form a step further by structuring her work in a more spider-like arrangement. What is more, in These Waves of Girls the reader is given the opportunity to listen to the story instead of reading it. The importance of These Waves of Girls lies in the way it brings the human body into the digital space. (Lizzy Pournara)
