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Judy Garland, Ginger Love [Hardcover]

Nicole Cooley (Author)
3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)


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Book Description

August 19, 1998
In her extraordinary debut novel, critically acclaimed poet Nicole Cooley takes readers on a humorous, achingly beautiful journey to a world of magical escapes and startling restorative truths. Judy Garland, Ginger Love is about motherhood and sisterhood, being and becoming, loving and learning to let go.

I know about sisters. Being a sister is the role in life I've always been best at, the one part I could play well. When I tried to become a mother, I failed.

After a tragic pregnancy leaves Alice Carson bereft and unmoored, she turns for comfort not to her husband, but rather to her estranged identical twin Madeline. However, this attempted return to the past is fraught with emotional landmines. While Alice, calm and serious, is the older sister, born five minutes earlier, the explosive and wild Madeline has dominated the pair's solitary lives since childhood.

From birth, Alice and Madeline shared a private, imaginary worldone colored by the larger-than-life tale of the dazzling and tragic MGM star Judy Garland. Handed down from their grandmother to their mother and now to them, the dramatic story of the actress' rise to stardom inspires Alice and Madeline to create their own Emerald City. Playing out their deepest fantasies in the empty swimming pool of the cheap New Orleans motel they called home, the young Alice and Madeline transform themselves into Judy Garland and her "baby sister" Ginger Love.

The twins' enchanted world is shattered the day their mother abandons them, vanishing with little more than a brief goodbye. Now, years later, Alice gives herself up to her sister's outrageous scheme to find Lily. Having lost her unborn daughter, Alice desperately hopes to get her mother back.

As the open road draws the sisters closer to their past, two women come face to face with life's painful realities; for the nearer they come to recapturing Emerald City, the more Madeline unravels, and the more Alice begins to see where her home is, and where her heart truly belongs.

Judy Garland, Ginger Love resonates with profound insights that will leave no reader untouched.

"A touching return to love."
Barbara Esstman, author of Night Ride Home


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bravely venturing into several recently well-mowed fields (most obviously identical twinship and eating disorders), Cooley gamely searches for fresh insights in this quirky, initially intriguing but ultimately wearying debut about a family of women fascinated with WWII-era Hollywood glamour. Narrated by Alice, who has returned to her hometown of Sarasota with Owen, her linguist husband, in a misguided attempt to avoid mourning the intrauterine death of their baby, the novel is actually dominated by Madeline, Alice's estranged, unbalanced twin sister. The siblings reunite to track down their mother, Lily, in New Orleans. Lily bore the girls when she was a teenager and disappeared when Alice and Madeline turned 18, long after she had prodded them into bulimia (a habit she learned from her grandmother, also a twin). She also passed on to them her obsession with Judy Garland and the Hollywood mystique. "I lost my daughter, but I'll get my mother back," Alice determines, yet the equation isn't that simple. Instead, Alice loses her sister once again but regains her future. Although Cooley, a Walt Whitman Award-winning poet (Renaissance), emulates more accomplished writers such as Alice Hoffman and Anne Tyler in this multigenerational story of neurosis, she burdens her flimsy domestic drama with symbolically loaded (but too often misfiring) references to Frida Kahlo, Alice in Wonderland, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and the Emerald City. The novel's primary drawback is the characterization of Madeline, whose mania is exhausting both for sane sister Alice and for readers, who may long for a mild sedative by the end of this tiring road trip. Agent, Sally Wofford Girand; first serial to the Paris Review.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The trouble with books about dysfunctional families is that one dysfunction is no longer enough. In this bleak first novel, poet Cooley, winner of the 1995 Walt Whitman Award for Resurrection (Louisiana State Univ., 1996), contrives a laundry list of issues. Start with twin sisters, united by their obsession for Judy Garland, their fixation on purging their bodies by drinking vinegar, and, most significantly, their abandonment by their mother, Lily, when they are barely 18. Subtract the father completely. Add, for Alice, a recent stillbirth; and make Madeline, the more manipulative sister, a shoplifter and drug abuser who is mentally unstable. The plot, weak at best, alternates among scenes from Lily's childhood, descriptions of the twins' youth in a cheap motel where their mother cleaned rooms, and the present, as the sisters try to locate Lily. The tone is unremittingly bleak and ultimately tedious, as the book fails to draw a larger, universal lesson from its catalog of pain. Not recommended.?Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (August 19, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0060392517
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060392512
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,918,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

20 Reviews
5 star:
 (9)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
 (5)
1 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.1 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An intricately thoughtful and emotional text., July 25, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Judy Garland, Ginger Love (Hardcover)
Nicole Cooley's Judy Garland, Ginger Love creates a splendid world where two sisters, twins, explore their relationships to each other and to their distant mother. Cooley's use of the famous Judy Garland in this triangle between the two daughters and their mother is fresh and captivating. Her first novel overfills my expectation and provides anticipation for the next one from this talented woman.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars a brilliant debut by a major young talent, September 16, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Judy Garland, Ginger Love (Hardcover)
This novel deconstructs our established, canonical view of marriage and the relation between members of a family.It is impossible to emerge from a reading of this novel without an entirely new view of our own world. The novel is a devastating experience for the male reader.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars "Judy Garland, Ginger Love", May 17, 2000
By 
Allen Michie (Williamsburg, IA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Judy Garland, Ginger Love (Hardcover)
A tale of two twin sisters, each of them a bit neurotic in their own different way, on a quest to find their mother who abandoned them at 16. This is a gripping and unusual narrative, full of psychological insight into the nature of sisterhood and the powerful appeal that our childhood desires still make on our adult lives.
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