Rating: 
Summary: Good but not a ten
Review: "Girls" is a good novel by a good fiction writer. The dialog is witty (maybe a little too witty, a little too sharp for belief in some places) and the characterizations are excellent. One complaint: I think Rosalie Piri's attraction to Jack is unconvincing. She's young, attractive, a professor at the college; he's a security guard with a high-school diploma and a load of unresolved problems from his marriage and left over from Vietnam. Why is she drawn to him? It's not just a quick sexual thing because she's there in the background, months later, at the end of the book. Is she attracted to his dark, tortured nature? Maybe, but it's not developed. Many very good scenes. Busch has a good feel for what motivates different types of personalities and how that motivation is expressed in behavior, gestures, expressions.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing, reads like a bad T.V. movie treatment
Review: "Girls" reads like a combination of the worst of Hemingway, DeLillo, Richard Ford and Raymond Carver. How many times do we have to read about what Jack fed his dog? Or himself? Sections of this book were so lifeless that I thought I was going dyslexic. The backstory involving Jack and Fanny's daughter was particularly irksome, I mean, how can you care about their daughter's death when it is presented to you in such a cautious(or "literary") way? The subplot concerning the Vice President's visit was also underwritten and ridiculous. I won't even discuss the incredible lame-ness of the cop-out ending. Busch obviously wanted to write a popular page-turner but chickened out. A book only an NPR listener could love.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful and honest Story.
Review: A wonderful and emotional ride. In "Girls", the reader becomes part of the autors world , feeling the pain, happiness and sorrow that go along with the theme. Not only does the reader become attached but it feels as if the reader is living the story being told. The novel depicts real life situations and focuses very much on those who try to leave the realities of their lives behind them.
When i fist read the title of the book, "Girls", i never thought that it would be more than just a simple book on the lives of girls living in America. The novel was powerful in the sense that the writer focused on the internal strength and guilt that comes along with adulthood. It invisioned real life situations such as drugs,marriage, self image and death. Frederick Busch really depicted the reality of life through the lives of each character.It was mysterious and intriguing,a powerful story that leaves us wondering and feeling each characters pain. It is impossible to put the book down it keeps you reading each page wanting to know what will happen next.The novel is mysterious and suspensful, filled with emotional struggles and life changing events. A story that deals with one's endless battle with life and reality.
I recommend this book to anyone who has suffered or lost someone they love. Anyone who wishes to understand the tragities of life a little better. This book really is an eye opener and can teach us alot about moral values and the fragilties that life bestowes upon us.Frederick Busch has written a wonderful novel that reaches deep into your soul.
Rating: 
Summary: Descriptive, complex characters
Review: An excellent read, sure to keep you reading straight thru till the end. Exciting and heartbreaking. One of my favorites in recent months
Rating:
Summary: Girls, By Frederick Busch: Hemingway Redux?
Review: At first blush, "Girls" by Frederick Busch seems to be a murder mystery with psychological overtones. At second blush, the novel begins to evolve into a psychological tale with overtones of murder. And in the end, after you've finished it, weighed it, and reread a few chapters, you realize that in reality, this story is about that rarest of aves, the male nurturer and protector, shown in a way seldom seen in literature. The protagonist of "Girls", Jack, is in many ways the kind of man Jake Barnes in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" might have become, had Jake lived to discontented middle-age, married to a strong but highly stressed woman, and with both of them grieving a lost child and not Jake's lost genitals. One can, of course, take this comparison too far rather quickly, but at base, I think it is an apt one. Busch is exploring the same terrain as did Papa, asking the question: what can a man do, what should a man do? You see, Jac! ! k is married to Fanny. He's 44 years old and a Viet-Nam veteran. As such things go, he had a good war, working as military policeman in Saigon, and suffering relatively little in the way of the direct combat damage that is a popular staple of modern fiction. After a couple of tours in the 'nam, Jack comes home, marries Fanny and it appears they have had a pretty good life, except for the unfortunate death of their baby girl, Hannah, a child they both wanted badly. That's the appearance. The reality is deeper and in the end, much darker. As the novel opens, Jack is working as a security cop at an unnamed college in upstate New York, in the middle of a winter so dire that you keep expecting Cossacks to emerge from the blowing snow, probably accompanied by "Fargo"'s Frances McDermond. As a campus cop, his charges are the sons and daughters of the affluent 80's and 90's; they take drugs, drink too much, attempt suicide, screw the occasional professor, talk back, look d! ! own and generally act like the thoughtless children that th! ey are. Nevertheless, Jack, faithful Jack, looks after them as best he can, pulling their cars out of snow drifts, braving blizzards to haul their ungrateful little butts to the hospital to treat drug overdoses and even attempting to keep the big, bad world of drug dealing at a one step remove from the campus. So, Jack's a hero, right? Well, maybe. Because while he's playing daddy and uncle to a campus full of brats, his marriage to Fanny, who is a nurse at the local hospital, is disintegrating. Like an arthritic joint, grinding itself to pieces under the pressure of daily use, the marriage is collapsing into hopeless fragments. And the pressure point of that grinding force is the death of the baby Hannah. Wordless rage, incoherent resentment, dumb grieving -- you name it, Jack and Fanny have it. And 'it' is destroying them individually and as a couple. And as this destruction remorselessly proceeds, each of them seek ever more shelter in their roles of protector and nurtu! ! rer outside the marriage: as campus cop and as nurse. Into this scene of domestic horror, amid the winter from hell, comes a kind of reprieve, at least for Jack. A little girl in the town disappears. The local and state police are baffled. Through the intervention of a repugnantly familiar professor at the college, Jack's assistance is sought by the grieving parents in the search for the girl. His background and skills are limited, but he has at least one critical thing to contribute to the process: an intimate knowledge of human nature and particularly of the human nature in the little town and gown community where he lives. And he takes this critical faculty, and with many a false start, stumbles to a solution of the girl's disappearance. In the meantime, Jack's investigation into the disappearance of the girl puts the finishing touches on his marriage to Fanny. And in the final breakup and breakdown of that relationship, some ultimate truths are revealed about the death o! ! f Hannah, as well as about Jack and Fanny's relationship.I've tried to convey a bit of the broad story line in this novel without giving away too much, since there are indeed elements of suspense and surprise that are important to the story. Yet, no summary can properly convey the spare, intensely precise narrative and visual skills Frederick Busch brings to the writing of this book. He is a major talent with a typewriter, and I recommend this book solely on the basis of Busch's stylistic value. But, as I've also tried to convey, he brings a great deal more to the party than a slick manner with the keyboard. This book, literally, tries to answer Brett's question to Jake: could they have had a 'damned good time together', or was it merely, as Jake said, 'Pretty to think so'?Busch's book creates a character who, arguably, is an older, more mature, less youthfully cynical Jake. But it's a Jake that still seeks to nurture and to protect those around him, ignoring his own weaknesses and shortcomings in the process. A powerful modern ! ! writer has, in my opinion, taken up Hemingway's cudgel and is advancing the case for a traditional, heroic male figure, cast in a modern mold. That what emerges from this effort is a character who is both traditionally male, while simultaneously exhibiting equally traditional female characteristics of nurture, caring, and self-sacrifice is an appropriate coda to Hemingway's work. I think Papa would have wanted it this way. I think Papa did want it this way.
Rating:
Summary: Compeling and stark
Review: Beautiful writing, the word dense keeps coming to mind. The story is so thick and dense, I got lost in it. I am impressed with the dreams inside reality. Jack is a flawed and awsome hero and humble enough to give credit to those who aid him. Fanny makes my guts tighten, I want so much for her to explode safely. Thanks to Mr. Busch for the comic relief every now and then, a chance to catch my breath. Am now looking for more of the author's books, since this was my first. Great story. All the characters were defined economically, yet with perfect clarity.
Rating:
Summary: A search for one body and two souls in "Girls"
Review: Frederick Busch's "Girls" is one of those rare novels that deftly blends a mystery of great intrigue with a protagonist's even more compelling search for himself. Busch's story, told through a hardened Vietnam vet turned campus cop, rings true in every sense. This archetypical tough guy and his, perhaps, even tougher wife must deal with the displaced sorrow they never fully felt for their own kidnapped daughter when, a decade later, a teenage girl turns up missing in the small university town where they live. "Girls" offers a unique journey into the heart of a character that most writers today would try to escape without painting. "Girls" promises to be one of the year's best
Rating: 
Summary: Girls
Review: Girls is a book you would like to give a try for a slow, easy read. It starts out by introducing our main character Jack. Jack is a 44-year-old Vietnam veteran who is now a security guard on a college campus in New York. His wife Fanny is a nurse and both are still coping on the loss of their baby daughter, Hannah. At the time a girl disappears, and Jack feels that he should help out with the investigation on his own to help the grieving parents. But as he helps he comes along memories of his daughter Hannah and causes troubles with his wife Fanny. Along the way and towards the end many things are revealed mainly about the death of Hannah.
I recommend this book for those who are looking for a neutral book to read. It does have some mystery to it, but that's about it. Busch is descriptive in the way he describes the scenery and the investigation of the missing girl, but could expand more in detail about the main characters. He often repeats details though as if he couldn't find anything else to say at the moment. The novel seems to need something to catch the audience's interest. Though the truths that turn up little by little through out the book do keep you turning the page. But not only does he need to add more detail to the characters, but to the death of Hannah, their daughter. Overall, this book is worth a try.
Rating:
Summary: A disturbing little book
Review: I admired _Girls_ for many of its qualities, not the least of which is the strong characterization. At its heart, it tells the story of the effect that a child's death has had on a marriage, and all the ways that people try to cope with and understand what happened. Jack and Fanny and Rosalie are sad and wise and believable, as are the landscapes they move in (both physical and emotional). For me, what limited the novel was the whodunnit aspect of the disappearance of Janice Tanner. While I understand how Busch tried to build it into the emotional plot, and while I think that the effect on Jack of her disappearance was a believable way to trigger the events of the story, I was disappointed with its eventual resolution and the neat way that the questions of guilt that it raised tied into Jack's own marriage. The completeness of the story felt contrived, as Jack seemed to me the sort of character who is never really complete. I picked up the book in a fairly random way, and am glad that I did. I grew up in upstate New York, and Busch captured the atmosphere in a way that made the time to read the book worth it for that alone. I'll probably read more Busch as I come across it, but I think that the next time I will go for the short stories, as the best part of this novel was the part that I thought of as a very good short story.
Rating:
Summary: how did you do this
Review: I am hoping the author checks these reviews. I would like to hear from him or other readers. I read a lot, mostly fiction. I have never read a writing like this. I write well but I read from my pores I think this may be the best writing I've read. This is my first read from you. How/why can you do this? Why do you feel you can depend on your readers for all the spaces? Why do you trust us ?
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