Rating: 
Summary: Coming of age with a fresh voice
Review: In the tradition of many American debut novelists, Julianna Baggott has constructed a coming-of-age story told in first person. To her enormous credit, Baggott distinguishes her book from the pack. The narrative voice of Lissy is fresh and endearing as she tells of a crazy summer "that never was" when her father left the family for Vivian Spivy, a red-headed bank teller. To escape the gossip and shame, Lissy's mother takes her on a road trip that will forever shape their lives. They land first on Cape Cod ("the Cod" as her mother calls it) and then in Bayonne, New Jersey, where her mother's story began. Peopled by memorable and off-beat characters, this novel takes the reader from the childhood Lissy to the floundering adult as she learns (in details far too intimate for a ordinary teenager) the story of her mother and her loves, how Lissy came to be and what she could have been instead. Baggott shows clear talent here with lively language, confident characterizations, and sharp insight. Though the novel seems to struggle to find its conclusion, it does eventually get there despite some heavyhandedness. The final scene is perhaps the most touching and the most true moment in the entire book. This is a worthwhile read, and Baggott is most definitely a novelist to watch. Brief and breezy in tone, this would make a great beach or airplane book. And if you aren't going on vacation any time soon? Take your vacation in Lissy's world.
Rating:
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.
Rating: 
Summary: Dull MFA'd tripe
Review: If Baggott has an original voice, it certainly isn't shown in this novel. A paint-by-numbers narration and terribly dull, no one will read this in the coming years. Her poetry is a joke & frankly she's not only a bad writer, she's not a person worth remembering or talking about. Now, why am I surprised this garbage gets published?
Rating:
Summary: Dull MFA'd tripe
Review: If Baggott has an original voice, it certainly isn't shown in this novel. A paint-by-numbers narration and terribly dull, no one will read this in the coming years. Her poetry is a joke & frankly she's not only a bad writer, she's not a person worth remembering or talking about. Now, why am I surprised this garbage gets published?
Rating:
Summary: baggott's poetry is better
Review: I'm afraid this novel didn't work for me. The characters were flat and it felt cliche. The biggest annoyance, however, was the way Baggott recycled her images from her poetry. While I was reading Girl Talk, I was also reading her book of poems This County of Mothers. While the images in the poems were fresh and surprising, when I discovered them nearly word for word in her novel I felt cheated; that was a cheap shot.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating: 
Summary: Life's too short
Review: I felt totally ambivalent while I was reading this book. The characters didn't seem like real people to me, and I just thought the story wasn't interesing. I could have finished it without too much trouble, but I thought, what's the point? Don't waste your time on this book. Life is short. Spend it reading something really good.
Rating: 
Summary: Original, but cutesy and awkward
Review: For a book that at first glance appears to be just another Bridget Jones takeoff (women's-interests title, confessional first-person tone, 20-something professional or semiprofessional female narrator who loves all the wrong men and suffers the consequences), Girl Talk has an impressively original plot. The story alternates between Lissy's present-day concerns - her approaching 30th birthday and unintentional pregnancy - and a recounting of her 15th summer, during which her father left with a younger woman and her mother taught her what she has come to view as the blueprint for her own life. Surprisingly, it works. Both stories are compelling and entertaining, and the link between the two is plausible without being overbearing (the narrator avoids slipping into moralistic commentary on her past deeds). Moreover, the events of the stories are arranged to yield a pleasing resonance without seeming too contrived. Still, this is a three-star book. Its undoing is the language it's written in - tense, wooden, trying too hard. Occasionally the author breaks through with something good, but most of the time she's trying too hard to make every phrase beautiful and meaningful, yielding only a series of empty platitudes. The book's descriptive passages are lacking in quantity as well as quality, leaving the external landscape fuzzy in favor of detailing the narrator's every thought. The final pages, which are obviously designed to leave the reader with a certain sensation, fall flat. I knew what the author wanted me to feel, but I didn't feel it. In the end, all of that original plot left me with very little in the way of original thoughts. Still, this is not an unworthwhile book. It's cute. It certainly isn't bad. There's just so much out there that's very similar.
Rating: 
Summary: Engaging, marvelous characters
Review: This book was a nice surprise! I hadn't heard of the author before but she is a wonderful storyteller! The characters are very interesting. Book moves at a nice pace. I didn't want this to end. I am now buying her newest book "The Miss America Family". I hope it is as wonderful!
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