Customer Reviews

Live Girls

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Live Girls is a haunting, seering work of fiction which reads like someone you may know's journal - someone who is lost but is loathe to acknowledge that. And understandably for Catherine, our passive aggressive anti-heroine who makes up lie after lie on the spot, stitching remnants of other people's lives into the decaying fabric of her own. I was completely engrossed in the reading of this novel - it is so utterly numb as to be brutally, painfully honest - so honest that you laugh, because you recognize life as it really is. And Nugent's ability to invite the reader in, yet not offer them more than they are willing to bargain for, is perhaps the most exciting element of this book: there are those who hate it and say it's about nothing, and those who declare it the most depressing thing they've ever read and those who say it is packed with energy and thought and deed and idea and still others who are just content to glimpse this poor girl's life. We can't help Catherine. We wonder why she doesn't just get on with her life and we wonder if what she is doing to herself is a self-inflicted punishment or just the result of someone who never knew how to make the right choices because she's too afraid of life - afraid like her sister would want her to be, afraid and with no hope of acquiring any happiness whatsoever. I found this book to be refreshing, actually. Different. Unassuming. A fantastic read, by all means. Her prose is magnetic, it pulls you in. Just be careful not to fall into the world of her characters who are lost people, fragile at best, with facial bruises and sick cats and dying mothers and spiders living in their hearts and little wooden children running in the yard, and city jobs where they trap pigeons all day long....Live Girls is a triumph. I look forward to more from this writer.

Live Girls is a novel suffused with an unforgettable atmosphere; the world it conjures can't easily be forgotten. Anybody who cares about the craft of writing (particularly aspiring writers), should read this book to learn how much can be done with a first person, intimate narrative, without 'writerly' showing off or horrible sentimentality. Yes, it's dark and creepy, but people who criticise the book on this basis seem to miss the point completely. I wish Nugent would write another book. Is there another book I don't know about?

I was at a thrift store and took a chance. I read the back of the book and I must admit, the anorexic drag queen lured me in.
I bought this book for way under a dollar and it has been the best change I have ever spent.
This book is highly entertaining.
The descriptions that Beth Nugent uses are so sad and dark and beautiful. These descriptions haunt and delight me.
Grotesque and gorgeous.
This book touched me in so many ways. I found myself in a lot of the characters, from Catherine to Jerome.
Live Girls does paint a depressing picture but don't let that throw you off of this book. There is so much more.
This book is like reading a diary. We learn so much about Catherine's psyche.
I keep letters I find in the street and pictures I find at thrift stores. I sit and think of these people's lives.
I even carry a man's drivers license I found on my way home one day in my purse.
I love to learn about people and although Catherine isn't real, I've had a wonderful time learning about her.
The characters are very real and you do feel sorry for them.
Read this book with an open mind.
Beth Nugent is an excellent writer and I look forward to all of her books.
Take a chance and read this book.

I bought this over a year ago and only got through about the first third before putting it down -- not from any shortcomings of the book, but simply because it was too damned dark and bleak for me to take at the time. I've since read it through, and have to say Nugent is a formidable writer -- whose groteque characters call to mind Flannery O'Connor, Marilynne Robinson, and the best of the nineteenth century Russians -- but her vision can be unflinchingly grim. Don't mix your downers, it can be lethal.

Actually, it isn't sure that she ever had one. But anyway, I loved Nugent's first book, City of Boys; and I find the same scary, detail-ridden, enjoyable (if you don't insist on taking it seriously) sense of humor here. I've read some negative reviews and I want to tell them, lighten up. No need to be like, or judge, Catherine to follow her journey.

As an aspiring writer I have been on a perpetual search for something that "grabs me." My search ended when I discovered Beth Nugent. This novel paints a captivating portrait of a lost soul. Reading her stories, and this particular novel, is like watching an Ingmar Bergman film. It's like watching blue shadows dance upon the wall. She is head to head with Joyce Carol Oates -- in my humble opinion. --Julie Bickley

Though I am in my early twenties, I read a lot of contemporary literary fiction. Of the novels I have read in the past year or so, Live Girls really stands out for me as one of the strongest. Far from pointless or boring or depressing, Live Girls is a narrowing and beautiful representation of life for (those I hesitate to use the term) Gen X-ers. Live Girls is vividly written and genuinely moving. It presents some of the cynicism and isolation and depression that deeply effects our time. A perfect novel

This is one of the most exciting novels I've read in a few years - even better perhaps than Nugent's 'City of Boys' collection. In this book, Beth Nugent has created an atmosphere, a slightly surreal world of her own that reflects but is at right angles to this one. Her characters live isolated impenetrable lives, unable to communicate or make real contact with others. Perhaps the eerie quality of the prose and the unexplained nature of Catherine's (the narrator) motivations have led some people to call the book pointless or depressing (more a personal reaction than than a valid criticism), but that is to misunderstand the atmosphere she creates, the humour she manages to inject into the story, and the way the book is just so readable.

I *loved* Nugent's prize-winning story, "City of Boys". It's one of my all-time favorite short stories. But the charm of her style is not enough to carry a novel in which nothing happens, which has no likable characters, and which presents a world which is so pointless that it's not worth reading about. Sorry to say this, but don't waste your money -- or time! -- on this book.

I'm all for what I'd call cynical-aesthetic if there seems to be a point to it - if there's a place that it's all leading me towards in terms of understanding human character or experience in this end-of-the millenium maelstrom we live in. But this novel, which starts well enough and kept me reading so I could find the point, just didn't have enough of one. (Yes it's tough being unloved by your parents and living with memories of a dead sibling in a world in which women are objectified, blah, blah, blah. But then what?] Makes me want to return to 19th century fiction frankly - or at least some of the 20th century writers who know about plot, character, and dare I say it, IDEAS! If you want existential female angst go back to Joan Didion's 'Play It as It Lays.' Now that's a book. Lucky Beth Nugent, though. The porn-show theme gets her published - earning her some money and some readers - which says more about our world than her novel does. Don't waste your money or time.