Customer Reviews

Beautiful Girls

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved Beautiful Girls for its sensitive observations about being a woman today punctuated by an incisive humor. The women and girls in these stories are full of hopes and dreams, aching for something beyond their current lot. A young lawyer struggles with such mundane activities as laundry while her father slowly dies; a high school student faces the realization that she has a "lousy personality;" a woman vacationing on a tropical cruise wonders if she is suffering from "soul leakage." Ms. Bauman vividly imagines their inner lives, their pains, their longings, all with a wit akin to Lorrie Moore's, a sense of humor that simultaneously alleviates and heightens the intensity of emotions.

This is an amazing debut. I highly recommend it and eagerly look forward to Ms. Bauman's next book.

I was told to read Beautiful Girls from a respected friend. I hesitated because I do not like to read short stories. Nevertheless because the stories were short I began to read them.
To my surprise, I found each story to read like a novella.
The author is very talented. Each story comes full circle and most remarkably, each story has meaning and heartfelt warmth. Surprise! I remommend the book highly. It is a very good read and the author is very talented . I am looking forward to her next series of short,long or first complete novel.. I recommend Beautiful Girls highly!!

I loved Beautiful Girls! I loved these wonderfully rich stories that are brimming with life. With enormous charm and humor, Bauman writes about growing up, being beautiful, or un-beautiful, and the search for love and connection. The writing is exquisite and the characters are amazingly alive. These stories reminded me a little bit of Lorrie Moore's work. This is a book I want all my friends to read. A terrific debut!

I read these short stories one story at a time, often with several days in between. I kept thinking that each one was better than the one before. Each one had an essence that evoked poignant memories of every stage of life, even though the scenes and the characters ranged widely. Each also caused at least one breath-catching realization about life that had never occurred to me before, or had a lovely twist that brought forth a sigh, or a knowing shake of my head at an "out-of-the-mouths-of babes" moment or one for how trustingly childlike we can be at any age.

What a brilliant, glorious debut for a terrific story teller. Each of the stories is absorbing, compelling, and written with exquisite pathos and humor. It is easy to dwell in the lives of her character's, feel their joy, pain, and disappointments,and easily move on with the incredibly smooth flow of this narrative.

Here is one book that can't be put down, and is deeply satisfying throughout. Read this engrossing book effortlessly, and with great pleasure.

Kudos to Ms Bauman. I for one, am anxiously looking forward to her second writing.

These are beautiful stories told with great humor and heartfelt emotions. I fell in love with these characters and Beth Bauman's pitch-perfect writing. Can't wait for her next work!

An enlightening experience awaits the reader of Bauman's Beautiful Girls, tales both playful and tender. That they are so easy to read belies the careful structure and precise attention to detail, each vignette an imaginative take on the vulnerability of the human psyche.

The title story, "Beautiful Girls", exposes beauty for its facile usefulness, a passport to places where less fortunate girls never go, but a road fraught pitfalls nonetheless, the too easy physical attractions, the cruelty of entitlement and the impulse to discard emotions as dispensable. "Wash, Rinse, Spin" is a deeply compassionate story of the last wrenching days between a daughter and her dying father, the hours thick with loss, regret and the reality of a world without him.

The author carefully arranges her scenes, story by story, from "Eden" to "Wildlife of America", where images come to life, the sights and smells of clutter, yearning, discontent and abandoned hopes, as her characters stumble through the confusion of daily challenges. Bauman paints reality in exquisite detail, quirky and individual, yet somehow as familiar as a childhood memory. Her accessible style of writing taps into some well-hidden secret place, where mothers are unpredictable and fragile and fathers are embarrassing, where things go bump in the night and the child carefully monitors the behavior of the parents, caretaker of undisciplined adults.

Bauman's protagonists vacillate between loneliness and being alone, on the verge of that terrible isolation, but never falling into self-pity. Rather, each explores this territory, searching for a place of comfort, the accommodation of lonely vs. alone that so defines these characters and the author's fearless exploration of such feelings. Luan Gaines/2004.

What a pleasure it is to find a collection of stories full of keen observation, deft use of language and, at the same time, so funny and enjoyable to read. Bauman has an unfailing ear for dialogue. She is sure-handed and crisp in depicting her lively, sometimes tough, sometimes fragile characters. The stories in "Beautiful Girls", like the stories of William Trevor, are often quiet on the surface but the emotional and social worlds of the characters are so fully realized and meticulously observed that the narrative is swept along with every small shift, event or action.

I zipped through each of the stories quickly but at the end of each one I had to pause a while, my mind full of details and impressions that took time to seep in. Technical skill aside, Bauman's writing also works on a simple, human level. Some of her stories like "Wash, Rinse, Spin" can make you laugh out loud even as they slowly, gently break your heart.

For me this collection is worth owning because it is like a good poem: I keep going back and re-reading it, happy to return to the comfortable pleasures I know I'll find and delighted to discover new ones every time I open the book again.

Anyone who had gone through growing pains can relate to the stories in Beautiful Girls. This wonderful collection is mostly centered on young girls and their struggles with growing up and their self-image. Of course, the stories are far more dimensional than that -- they center on the sort of problems that kids and teens go through while growing up, things that seemed too important during that period in our lives. And the interesting part is that there are stories of adult women in this book who go through things not unlike the younger generation. My favorite stories are "Stew," "The Middle of the Night," "Safeway," and "Wash, Rinse, Spin." I marvel at Beth Ann Beauman's keen storytelling and wonderful prose. Beautiful Girls is one great short-story collection and I look forward to reading more by this author in the future.

This collection reminded me of a cross between Flannery O'Connor and A.M Homes. O'Connor in the way she captures the dark edges of adult womanhood and Homes in her daring studies of youth. A top notch collection that should have garnered more attention than it did. Beth Ann--please write more!