Customer Reviews

Skirts

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

 

 

I enjoyed entering the world of "Skirts" and read the book eagerly. It had no competition for my attention while I was reading it. I did not previously have any particular affinity for either New York or the Sixties beat scene, but Mimi Albert made them both so real for me I didn't think of categories but just about the lives of the young women I was reading about. Her writing was very grounded in time and place and her scenes wonderfully visualized. The book was absolutely swarming with mood and yet I never lost my bearings. Albert was always in control of her story and kept with with her start to finish.

This award-winning book deserves far more recognition than it's getting. Skirts is the mesmerizing story of three young women on their own in Greenwich Village, seeking excitement among the Beat Generation. Mimi Albert (The Second Story Man) writes with power of the seduced and the seducer with Zalman, the handsome son of a rabbi, urging `turning on' to life (which includes drugs). He is both alluring and scary, esp as he lures the innocent Helene deeper into a world of exotics she could not previously have imagined.
I believe it's difficult for today's female readers (the young ones, anyway) to imagine the strictures under which women of the 50s and early 60s were expected to live - and it is against that background that Helene, Ruth, and Victoria are operating. Albert's eloquent language and dramatic narrative help make that background come alive with even more contrast to what the women discover about the world and themselves in the rarified air of Greenwich Village.

I read Skirts several years ago and loved it. I hope this gifted writer releases a new book soon.

"Skirts", Mimi Albert's novel about 3 women in Greenwich Village in the early 60s, tells a familiar kind of story: women before they became "liberated" could have had limited options, and when young people get exposed to drugs and/or sex, bad things happen. One of the girls has to have a hush-hush abortion, another just goes on a long decline until near the end. The story really didn't grip me, and I felt the author brought nothing new here.