The Eleanor Roosevelt Girls [Paperback]

Bonnie Bluh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

The powerful story of Julia and Mallory, two friends from Sunnyside, Queens. When they are twelve they form a club named after their hero, Eleanor Roosevelt . Its members are neighborhood girls, Catholics and Jews. In weekly meetings they share their dreams and hopes for the future. They grow up. Julia and Mallory head for Manhattan and the glittering worlds of literature and fashion. Other members go off in different directions. Then something unexpected happens, forcing them into a series of dangerous and heroic acts. A novel of courage and friendship spanning over a half century of changing times.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Through a lively sequence of flashbacks, Bluh (Woman to Woman) weaves a complex story of female friendships spanning more than 50 years. Upon hearing of her dearest friend Mallory's suicide, the bitter, grieving narrator, Julia, a successful playwright in her early 60s, reflects on her childhood in Sunnyside, Queens, a neighborhood fraught with tensions between its Catholic and Jewish residents. In 1937, insecure Julia, the brilliant, mercurial Mallory and six young girls of various religions and ethnic backgrounds find respite from home lives marked by absent, indifferent or abusive parents by forming a friendship club named for their heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt. As adults, the club members drift apart and into mostly failed marriages and romances with men, and the occasional harmonious lesbian relationship, as they build careers as disparate as fashion magazine editor, police detective, nun and dancer. Over the decades the women are repeatedly drawn together. Valiantly, sometimes illegally, they rescue each other from the perils of bad men and low self-esteem. Bluh's depiction of the intensities, jealousies, betrayals and loyalties of female friendship rings true; her portrait of the charismatic Mallory is particularly compelling. Mallory is both self-indulgent, carrying on an affair with, and eventually marrying, her friend Cynthia's father, and deeply generous, masterminding a plan to get her friend Claire out from under her monstrous husband's thumb. Julia's friendship with Mallory is as passionate as it is turbulent, and her struggle to understand her friend's suicide and to discover her identity apart from Mallory is delicately rendered. At times Bluh overstates her message of female solidarity, and this occasional flatness undermines the authentic, sensitive dialogue. But her flesh-and-blood women, especially Mallory and Julia, reveal the inspiring, necessarily complicated feminist vision at the heart of this fine novel.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A performer and playwright by trade, Bluh (Banana, LJ 5/15/76) tells the story of Julia and Mallory, two Jewish girls in Queens who become best friends in grade school. In 1942, at age 12, they gather six other girls, mostly Christian, to become the Eleanor Roosevelt Girls (ERG). Over the next 50 years, they are in and out of each other's lives, but Julia and Mallory remain especially close; as narrator, Julia must eventually deal with Mallory's unexpected suicide. Using Eleanor Roosevelt's epigraph "What one has to do usually can be done," they perform two rash but brave acts: they rescue and hide an abused ERG wife and, later, an ERG's half-sister. Not an engaging or skillful novel, this would have perhaps been more powerful as a play. Purchase only if the fiction budget is large.?Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib, Highland Heights
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: Lyrebird Books (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966482018
• ISBN-13: 978-0966482010
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,722,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Well written but disappointing, October 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Eleanor Roosevelt Girls (Paperback)

I picked up this book expecting to really like it. Instead, it became a chore to read. None of the characters were likeable. The author could have really done alot to expand the central characters instead of branching out to other new characters who I really could have cared less about. I was expecting a much better book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disjointed and disappointing, February 22, 2006

By 

Joanna Mechlinski (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Eleanor Roosevelt Girls (Paperback)

A big fan of historical fiction with strong female protagonists, I had big hopes for this book when I stumbled across it on a library shelf. But the style was simply too jarring - it didn't transition from the various vantage points well. None of the characters garnered my sympathy, because they just didn't emerge as "real" to me. I abandoned the book about halfway, skimming through in a quest for improvement. I didn't find it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars HIgh Expectations Disappointed, July 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Eleanor Roosevelt Girls (Paperback)

The premise of this book is excellent; unfortunately, the novel needed better editing, both in content and in style: at one crucial point, a villain-type is described as being down on "all fours," with his hands behind his back -- that impossible position makes the rest of this very important scene unbelievable. Also, better editing would have corrected such obvious and disappointing errors as the constant misspelling of "all right" and the erroneous use of the past tense form of the verb "lie." I was so looking forward to this book, but I couldn't finish it.