Catholic Girls [Mass Market Paperback]

Kit Reed (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A cross-country trek to a funeral frames this humorous but unrelentingly arch and predictable account of four one-time Catholic seminary "girls." Georgie, our guide through the book, is a second-string journalist desperate to regain a packet of love letters sent to the deceased in headier days and trying to redeem her career by landing a job at the tres chic, fantastically flaky new magazine, In. Straightlaced Mickey has made few adjustments to the modern world and can't fathom Kathleen, who has left the Church and describes herself as "living in sin, way in," with a juvenile lover named Lance. Their journey en route to comfort bereaved adultress Agnes Mary, is supposed to be one of self-discovery, but Reed (Armed Camps offers few striking revelations, while a morass of guiltthat ubiquitous Catholic guiltovershadows those truths that might have hit home.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Style and subject don't mesh in this novel, which is a hard, brilliant satire, tough to warm up to. Twenty years later the funeral of their friend Agnes's lover reunites four roommates from Catholic Mount Maria College at the Fulcrum Institute, a luxury hotel/compound for celebrities in Florida. Graduates of Mount Maria in the early 1960s, the four womenAgnes, a social worker and unhappy wife; Georgia, a moderately successful newspaper columnist; Kath, a strung-out poet; and Mickey, a housewife who still wears short white gloves to partiesare ill-prepared to cope with middle-aged marital breakdown and moral ambiguity. While Reed's sketches of dissipated scholars and showbiz people at the Institute are on target, her story calls for a stronger narrative thread, less bite and more heart. Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ivy Books (September 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804103615
• ISBN-13: 978-0804103619
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,011,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kit Reed's new short story collection, "What Wolves Know," just out from PS Publishing ( Spring 2011), includes stories originally published in venues ranging from Asimov's SF to the Kenyon Review and the Yale Review.

Called "a gripping dystopian thriller" in a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed's novels, Enclave, The Baby Merchant and Thinner Than Thou a winner of the A.L.A. Alex Award, and her collection, Dogs of Truth, are available in trade paperback. The New York Times Book Review has this to say about her work: "Most of these stories shine with the incisive edginess of brilliant cartoons... they are less fantastic than visionary." Other novels include @​expectations, Captain Grownup, Fort Privilege, Catholic Girls, J. Eden and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse. As Kit Craig she is the author of Gone, Twice Burned and other psychological thrillers published here and in the UK. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize.

A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.