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Summary: A novel about growing up and mother/daughter relationships
Review: Lissy Jablonski's most influential summer was the summer that never happened. When she was 15 her father, a soft spoken gynecologist ran off on Lissy and her mother with a redheaded bank teller. This event sparked many others that involved Lissy learning the truth about her father, the father she never knew she had, traveling to places she's never been with her suddenly all too open mother, meeting her first love and much more. Years later when Lissy is nearing 30 her life is falling apart. She's become pregnant with a married man's child, her first love has fallen in love with a Korean stripper and most traumatically, her father is dying. This causes her to flash back on her 15th summer, the most influential time in her life. Girl talk may seem a fun book at first but it has far deeper meanings underneath. If you're interested in a book about an adolescent girl becoming a woman, mother/daughter relationships and growing up in the 80s I recommend this to you. Although it isn't the most amazing book I have ever read it was thoroughly entertaining. I recommend it to all people, mothers and daughters alike.
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Summary: -----_____----- (picture that)
Review: Picture the book as that graph I made above. I'd say the beginning was great, the characters wonderful, deep, coming aware, interesting. Church and the protaganist were quite a dysfunctional match. The middle was very good (sorry if the graph depicts a bottom, but that is not the case). I view the middle as giving me too much repetitive information, in other words, it kind of slowed. Not to say that it was bad and I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression because I enjoyed this book immensely. The ending rocked! It was black and ironic, just the way I like it. I'd recommend the book.
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Summary: I liked it
Review: This book was rather surreal. It's about "the summer that never was" for 29-year-old unmarried, pregnant Lissy Jablonski. Told in flashbacks from her current adult self in 1999, Lissy recounts the summer of 1985, when she was 15 and her father ran away with his 24-year-old assistant. Lissy lets us know in the beginning that her dad will come back to her mom, but the events of hat summer and what she discovers about her family and lineage, about grandparents she never met and grandparents she didn't know she had, about asthmatic dogs named Jacko, her mother's snooty college roommate and her weird kids -- one who is her best friend in adulthood and inexplicably marries her stripper roommate, Kitty Hawk, within a week of meeting her. It is a muddled tale at times, but it is full of all the funny moments that bring us to the people who make up our whole lives. It could have been anyone's story, perhaps even someone you know, if they took the time to recount it to you. That's ehat made it veryinteresting to me, and enjoyable to boot.
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