Customer Reviews

City girl

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Set in the 1980s in Dublin,City Girl is a story of three women living in a chauvinist world and struggling to gain their freedom and independence from men.The novel develops three main threads,corresponding to the stories of Devlin,Caroline and Maggie,three young women portraied in two distinct periods of their youth. Scanlan snatches the physical and psycological portraits of the three girls and the society they live in with considerable descriptive skill. Devlin is beautiful,rich,immature and spoilt.She falls in love with a married man,who uses her,gets her pregnant and leaves her an unmarried mother.But a life full of shocking events makes her a completely different person in a few years'time. Caroline is fat,shy,totally lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem.She is terrified at the idea of being left manless.But marriage is no satisfactory solution to her problems.On the contrary,once married,she becomes an alcohol and drug-addict to escape from an unbearable reality.Then she discovers her husband's long-hidden secret and her life takes a sudden change. Maggie is the most rebellious and non-conformist of the three.Beautiful,strong,independent-minded,she lives life to the full until she eventually yields to the patriarchal law and gives up her independence by marrying a man who epitomizes the most deep-rooted chauvinism. The three girls are close friends and through all the troubles of life they can find peace in their friendship. A chauvinist,gossipy,narrow-minded Dublin provides the social sorroundings to the story.Dubliners and Irish people in general are described as hypocrit and intolerant. Scanlan writes in an informal,contemporary style,which is rich in realistic dialogues,colloquialisms and dialectal expressions.The structure of the novel is also interesting:the story is a flashback in six episodes,framed by a prologue and an epilogue,which contain information about the conclusion of the three girls' adventures.A good device to create suspense and grasp the reader's attention. Nevertheless,I found that the characters are rather "flat",that is to say they act exactly as the reader expects them to do.Some commonplaces do not spoil an unpretentious but well-written novel.

A really wonderful book once one is able to understand it. Set in Ireland the phrases are a bit hard to understand at first, but once over that the book is great. A must read for all women wondering what to do with there lives. The book gave me a lot of inspiration

Read when I was 15. Gave new and clearer views and now at 20, I can say has made me think about what im doing.