Local Girls - Softcover

Hoffman, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701169109 ISBN 13: 9780701169107

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

In this series of connected stories young Gretel Samuelson comes of age in a small-town neighbourhood and Alice Hoffman casts her characteristic spell over the lives of girls and women. Told from Gretel's sly and knowing perspective, Local Girls charts Gretel's always unexpected progress as she navigates from childhood to the brink of womanhood, through a series of long hot summers, picking her way through the tragedies and absurdities of everyday life in the Samuelson family that is constantly rocked by divorce and disaster, bad judgment and fierce attachments. Her father has left them, her chain-smoking mother Franny is falling apart and refuses to learn the simple lessons of life (like the fact that smoking gives you lung cancer), her aunt Margot is in love with romance but falls for all the wrong men, her Jewish grandmother has made a pact with God, her perfect brother goes off the rails with fatal results, and even her best friend Jill, blonde, enviable and beutiful, is moving too fast into the unfathomable world of women. Beautifully written and dazzingly crafted, Local Girls forms the irresistible portrait of a family, peeling at the edges, and of a young girl learning how to survive in a world that doesn't make sense.

About this title

Review:

More than a collection of short stories, yet not quite a novel, Local Girls occupies an undefined territory between these two forms. The local girls in question are Gretel Samuelson, her best friend, Jill, her mother, Franny, and Franny's cousin Margot--four characters who weave in and out of each of the 15 related stories that chronicle the rocky years of Gretel's adolescence. That hers will be a tough row to hoe is immediately apparent in the first story, "Dear Diary", in which Alice Hoffman introduces the Samuelson family just as they are being swallowed up by the fissures that have cracked them apart. "Long before the plane touched down in Miami we could hear our parents arguing," Gretel tells us of a family vacation to Florida; "and at the hotel room they locked themselves in their room. If you ask me, working so hard at being married can backfire." It is the end of the marriage that has lasting ramifications, however, as we discover in later stories: Gretel's brilliant older brother, Jason, becomes a drug addict; their mother must battle cancer alone; and Gretel becomes involved in a destructive relationship with a drug dealer. All pretty depressing plot points, to be sure, yet Hoffman's luminous prose combined with Gretel's tart and funny perspective keeps the reader eagerly turning the pages until the very end.

In fact, Gretel and her family and friends are so compelling, so endearing, that the reader wishes Hoffman had chosen to give the Samuelsons a novel instead of this series of stories. In reading about Jason's descent from A student with an acceptance letter from Harvard to working in the produce section at the local supermarket and shooting heroin, for example, one can't help but feel that a lot of his motivations happen between stories; and Gretel's difficult relationship (or lack thereof) with her father and new stepmother functions mainly as a plot device, leaving the reader wanting so much more. And yet, if one is to judge the success of a book by the reader's reluctance to be done with it, then Local Girls is successful, for Hoffman has created a world so enticing that one is willing to overlook the minor flaws. At the end of the title story, as the now-grown Gretel and Jill discuss two teenage girls in the neighbourhood who recently committed suicide, Jill remarks: "They should have just waited. That's all they had to do. They would have grown up and everything would have been all right." The same might be said of reading Local Girls. -- Alix Wilber

Review:

‘Alice Hoffman writes quite wonderfully about the magic in our lives’ -- The New York Times Book Review

‘Funny and vengeful, full of the rage and the impotence of youth’ -- Glasgow Herald

‘Local Girls is not only entertaining but uplifting’ -- Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0701169109
• ISBN 13: 9780701169107
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208