Customer Reviews

The Girls' Almanac

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

 

 

When I started this book, I thought it would be something I would like: the first character we meet, Lucy, is interesting and sympathetic, and her relationship with her mother seems relatable and universal. By the second chapter, however, the adult Lucy is gone, and the reader is suddenly catapulted back into Lucy's adolescent years. If the time change had been the only issue, this book might have still worked for me, but by the third chapter, Lucy is gone completely, and two new characters, Andrea and Gabrielle, are introduced. The whole book continues this way, jumping back and forth through time as well as switching amongst characters. I found it very difficult to keep the various players straight, especially since you never know whether someone you meet will appear again later or just has a brief role; the entire effect is extremely confusing. At the beginning of the book, there is a diagram showing the various interconnections between characters, but frankly, when I'm reading a novel, I don't want to feel like I have to work in order to keep up--having to constantly flip back to the front made this feel more like a textbook than fiction.

I think the idea of interrelated women's lives is a good one, but this novel reads more like a collection of short stories. I might recommend it to a female friend with more patience than I had for sorting through this complicated storyline.

Though she still mourns the sudden death of her fiancé, Lucy tries to get on with her life though her mom remarrying makes it more difficult. Jenna, a baker, loves her vocation more than people so when she is not baking she feels lonely and lost. Her mother raised her after her parents divorced, but Gabrielle the doctor only recently has been able to reconcile with her father as both regret how much they lost.

As these three thirty something lonely women become friends, they also begin to meet other people, have boyfriends, and grow closer to their parents. Each realizes how debilitating being alone truly is, but with one another that should not happen again no matter what curve ball life pitches at them.

Overall this astute character study collection is more a series of relational vignettes. Readers will enjoy the growth of the three dimensional females when something goes awry or is perceived as going wrong; on the other hand the two dimensional males start out pathetic and remain pathetic. The three amigas learn that everyone needs someone when life turns rough. Unwanted poetry aside, Emily Franklin provides a profound look at living not just surviving life.

Harriet Klausner

I thought this book was better than the other reviews implied. True, the book is disjointed, and seems more like a collection of short stories than a novel. But there's a term for that - "novel in stories." It is what it is.

I agree with the Amazon reviewer who said some of the shorter stories (a couple were just two pages each) felt undeveloped. And it was disconcerting to get attached to one character, and have that character disappear until later.

But the book as a whole was an interesting meditation on interconnectedness. It enables you to see a single character from several different perspectives. For example, a dead fiance cheated on his fiancee before he died, and the fiancee doesn't know he cheated, but the reader does. It makes the picture of a character seem fuller.

If you can get past the book's departure from traditional narrative rules, it's worth checking out.

I really disliked this book. I thought it would be more like "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing." I found it to be very depressing (although well-written, despite a few typos). The idea of interweaving the lives of women in a series of short stories and vignettes is an interesting one, but most of the women have some serious emotional problems or tragedies in their past that did not make for very uplifting reading. I would also not recommend this to anyone who is pregnant - there are many allusions to miscarrying and other gynecological problems.
I found it difficult to keep the different characters straight as well - there is a chart at the beginning of the book, but I had to keep flipping back to it to remember how the various women were related to each other as friends, cousins, etc. Overall, this was a disappointment.