Customer Reviews

Serious Girls: A Novel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Swann writes with startling honesty and vivid detail about the intense relationship between young girls. This is a hauntingly beautiful book. She has invited us into a world of complex and subtle friendship. From the first pages we care about Maya and Roe and their serious if not heartbreaking search for love and meaning. I could not put this book down. It is wonderful to be reminded how compelling good writing can be. And it is rare to find this kind of gem in the bookstores.

Maxine Swann's book is something rare. She has put her finger on something about my personal (and what I assume is a universal) experience about becoming a woman that I don't think I have ever read before. Reading this book had a powerful impact on me akin to my first experience of reading "Catcher in the Rye" and others, but it was so beautifully unique. I will cherish this book for a long time to come.

An intriguing novel of two young girls as they struggle to fit into boarding school and wait for "life to begin"...tand all the complexities that come with that assumption. Their maturation process and discovery of the outside world and sexual awakening is written with brutal honesty and exacting words that made it eerily painful but beautiful to read certain passages.

It is a great pleasure to read a first novel that is as lucidly and unprentiously written as Maxine Swann's. It is vivid and thoughtful. It's main characters are full of the intellectual and sexual energy that we associate with that time in in our lives when almost every adventure is new.

Maxine Swann's first novel flows with the rhythms of the young central character, Maya. She has spent years with her books and thoughts, but finds herself at boarding school aching for life to begin. Maya opens up to a like-minded friend at school and they share their fears, insecurities and philosophical wonderings with each other. They loose their detached coolness and clear headedness when their quest for life experiences delivers them boyfriends. Ms. Swann's style is sublime and beautiful as she leads us from quiet thoughtfulness into new adventures and through psychological unrest. What strikes me the most is how much more intimate the girls are with each other (no, not physically) than they are with their boyfriends (yes, physically). It's a wonderful journey that rings true.

Two girls, emotionally stranded by their parents, set out to compose their own characters and lives with deliberate fearlessness. They choose their futures with an arbitrariness that older people, with their weighted experience of consequence, can ill afford.

Swann conveys a wealth of rich sensations with delicious immediacy. I can't think of another work in recent years that captures so many incomprehensible, fleeting perceptions with such wonderous, nuanced specificity.

"Serious Girls", by Maxine Swann is the most beautiful, poetic, funny and profound piece of literature I have read in many years. I can't think of a more enlightening novel written about the life of two young girls and their first experiences in this world.
The subtelty, courage, and the vivid descriptions of the author make me think that these two characters, Maya and Roe, unveil what we secretly knew all along about women, in spite of all the usually more banal or cliche depictions of them. A true small miracle.

Anyone who happened upon Maxine Swann's "Flower Children" in Garrison Keillot's collection of Best Short Stories of 1998, know that there were more great stories coming. Her novel "Serious Girls", plants one of these flower children in young adulthood. Totally unprepared to fit in socially, Maya begins her exploration of life beyond her mother's garden. Maya's observations of the natural world are as keen as her insights into the persons around her. The description of an ice storm at her boarding school will invoke chills.
Ms. Swann's "Flower Children" left the reader frightened for the fate of the spawn of the love and peace generation. Could children "raised" totally unstructured, unfettered, and exposed to all the mysteries of adult life at an early age possibly cope with life in the malls of America ? "Serious Girls" delivers the answer. The author's fine ear for dialog and gift for unfolding this unique story keeps the reader embedded in the novel from beginning to end. I'm hoping for much more writing from Ms. Swann.

Never before has a novel taken me so far into the intextricable depths of the psyche of an adolecent girl. The complexity of maturing into womanhood is exquisitely unfolded upon us in the story of Maya.

Maxine Swann's novel is an intense and vivid evocation of the painful and sweet years between childhood and adulthood. It has a dreamlike quality in which events seem to toss the characters around. Their dazed reactions are carefully traced by Swann who has an uncanny talent for reminding the reader of the mysteries of awakening and transformation.
This is a book to be read and re-read.