Customer Reviews

Such a Girl: A Novel

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

 

 

Nine years ago at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Kendall Stark heeded the advice of her friends by ending her two year relationship with Jack Sullivan because everyone insisted he was a loser. Now, Kendall is a thirty-one year old single living in Brooklyn, working as a communications operator at a popular luxurious Manhattan hotel, and having a nowhere affair with a married man.

Kendall feels contented until she sees Jack, owner of New England?s very successful Sullivan Brewery who is staying at the hotel. Kendall handles herself reasonably well during the encounter, but as he leaves his look back is filled with disappointment that shakes her to the core of her essence. Kendall realizes what she lost when she stopped being Sullivan?s Ken; she decides she must try to win back his love. However, Jack not only has to forgive, he wonders if she desires him because he is a success?

As CLUELESS DID TO Jane Austen's EMMA, SUCH A GIRL provides the same delightful treatment to the author?s PERSUASION with Ken being Anne Elliot and Sullivan is retired naval officer Frederick Wentworth. The enjoyable second chance at love story line reflects a realistic social order that though the plot takes place in the twenty-first century could have easily been in the early 1800s. Sullivan is a wonderful protagonist as he wants his Ken back in his life, but doubts he can trust her with his heart. Ken regrets the error that shaped her life, but shows courage as she decides to prove she is his significant other forever. Together they make an intelligent and witty tale.

Such a Girl is a reflectively told novel that will grasp the mind of any reader who has ever questioned the choices they have made and the path that they have followed to bring them to the place where they are today.

Karen Siplin gives us the story of Kendall Stark, a phone operator at posh hotel with celebrity clientele. When one of the guests turns out to be the former boyfriend she dumped years before?with the approval of her friends, who thought that he was going nowhere fast and taking her along for the ride?it brings about a lot of questions for Kendall. Aside from the love that she is struggling not to still have for a now highly successful and engaged Jack Sullivan, Kendall now struggles with thoughts of her dead end job, her relationship with a co-worker who is a married man, her purpose in life and the choices she?s made to get there. She evaluates the ?unsuccessful? lives of herself and her friends as her ex comes back to gloat before the woman he never stopped loving and her judgmental friends.

Siplin writes in blow-by-blow motion that makes no to attempt to create a world for the reader, but rather states things as-a-matter-of-factly and leaves the rest up to the reader?s imagination. Her talents are so great that she is able to do this and allow the words and motion to convey strong tensions and emotions between and within the characters. However, because of this writing style, some of the pivotal characters, namely Amy, Nick, and Gary, do not come off the page and tend to blend into one another or do not come across as uniquely as they possibly could.

Such A Girl is a moderately paced thought provoking novel as well as a subtle love story. This minimal drama story is a great alternative read from a writer with a highly distinctive and enchanting voice in fiction

Readincolor Reviewers
Cherlyn Michaels

I picked up this book because of its description as being loosely based on Jane Austen's Persuasion. I happen to like Austen originals, as well as movies and books based on her works. This was no exception. "Such A Girl" is the conduit for Kendall Stark's life story. Almost a decade ago while in college, Kendall broke up with her love Jack Sullivan because her upwardly mobile college friends saw him as someone going nowhere FAST. Jack was a loafer, but one who was determined to enjoy life even if things like classes got in the way. After many breakup-to-makeup periods, Kendall walked out of his life and didn't look back.

Now she's living a life that passes as satisfying. She's a 31-year hotel telephone operator who lives with one of her aforementioned college friends, now an aspiring writer who works as a waiter. When Jack walks into her hotel one day, she's hit right in the fast with her unresolved history. Jack is now a successful owner of a beer manufacturing company. It seems that Jack is living the life that Kendall and her friends were struggling to attain years ago. Though they missed the mark, Jack is sitting pretty - with a fiancée to boot. Kendall, who is involved in an affair with a married man, must face her lingering feelings for Jack as she struggles to understand what Jack is doing in "her" hotel.

It's a nice adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion with all the social commentary on the differences in classes and love lost due to superficial reasons. I enjoyed the novel. My only criticism is that the tales of Kendall's life as an operator and her interactions with co-workers and neighbors were often too many and too detailed for me. I was particularly distracted by her ongoing conflicts with her neighbors, which distracted from the overall flow of the novel at times. It was annoying, but it didn't interfere greatly with my overall enjoyment of the story and its underlying romantic themes.

This book is one of the best bok I have read this year.I think that every female from the age of 13-39 sould read this book.I bought this book on my to the capital trip, and let me tell you that as soon as you read the first sentence you will want to know more about characters of the story

Kendall Stark is the lovely, underachieving heroine of the novel. Kendall is a telephone operator at a very high-end hotel in New York City, where she barely gets along with most of her coworkers, except for the cute married coworker that she sleeps with from time to time. She's single, in debt, and lives with a roommate who is also an old college friend. Then a blast from the past walks into her life - the love of her college life, Jack Sullivan. The twist: Kendall broke his heart nine years ago, when her friends persuaded her that Jack was simply a bad boy who was headed nowhere in life. Either because she believed her friends or because she was scared at the intensity of the relationship, she let Jack go. Now, she barely knows how to face him.

Years later, only one of these college friends has actually done something successful with his life, and the rest, including Kendall are broke and without any visible career. But Jack Sullivan is a millionaire. And suddenly he's staying at the hotel in which Kendall works, reconnecting with Kendall's friends from college - who never liked him when he was broke - all with the unstated and slightly benign purpose of throwing his success and wealth in their faces.

From the beginning of this cute tale to the end, I have two recurring thoughts. One: How does a college graduate wind up working as a hotel switchboard operator nine years after graduation? Just how in the world did Kendall Stark get there, and didn't she ever want to be anywhere else? And it isn't the fact that she's broke - because many, many college graduates live check-to-check and can barely afford to pay rent. But Kendall she has a college degree, and she answers phones! That just seemed crazy to me. She doesn't appear to have plans or aspirations to do anything else. My second recurring thought: Kendall Stark = K.S. = Karen Siplin. Is there an element of autobiography here, or pure coincidence?

Overall, I enjoyed the book. My confusion about Kendall's complete lack of professional ambition really blurred the comparison between Such a Girl and Jane Austen's "Persuasion." I understood how a Jane Austen heroine could have no professional ambition or a career. The part of the plot doesn't transfer to this day and age.

Karen Siplin's second novel is a witty and engaging modern 'Persuasion" with a multicultural cast and more depth and soul then most chicklit novels about relationships. The class conflicts between the chic clientele and the telephone operators behind the scenes of a fancy Manhattan hotel are priceliness and worth the price of admission alone. I found myself rooting for Kendall and her ex-boyfriend Jack and was pleased that a book with such a cynical realistic edge could also wind up so satisfying and romantic.

I love the way Karen Siplin writes. I just don't get what story she's trying to tell.

Kendall is a 30-something, underachieving, phone operator for a high-end NY hotel. How she got to that point is never explained fully. It seems too simple to atribute her lack of success to a lack of ambition, and yet that's all Siplin gives us.

Then the "the one she threw away" ex-boyfriend, Jack, shows up trying to rekindle the relationship, and most of the book is spent reading about her bouncing from resentment to realization about how immature she'd been to let her friends control her relationship with Jack.

I never get why Jack wasn't good enough for Kendall's group of friends. It was never explained if he was too rich or too poor. Class was definitely introduced into the group's relationship, but there was light a touch on how it affected their past. At most the impression was that Jack was considered to be unfocused, but even that sounded crazy when in college they purported themselves to be free spirits, and he supposedly graduated from school just like they had.

I'm not giving anything away by saying Jack and Kendall end up together. But what I wonder is if her ex was ultimately her chance to become successful, instead of Kendall getting off her @ss and making more substantive moves. I almost felt sorry for Jack for getting what he wants.

The class issues mentioned in the book aren't resolved. They peeter out as Kendall gets closer and closer to taking Jack back. Its as if Kendall had been slumming, and then finally decided to becoming one of them, so one way or another she was given a pass.

The ending was unrealistic. I don't know how I feel about the book overall. But it was very well written and I think that Karen Siplin has a gift for it.

This is a modern re-telling of Jane Austen's Persuasion and it's very well-written, witty, and poignant. I wouldn't say it's quite as good as the two other modern adaptations of Persuasion that I've read (*Jane Austen in Scarsdale* and *Persuading Annie*) but Karen Siplin is obviously a talented writer and she makes the material her own.

My one criticism is that unlike the original story, the heroine of this tale, (Kendall), doesn't really meet her hero (Jack) halfway. One of the nice things about Persuasion is the way in which Anne and Captain Wentworth long for each other equally, make the same number of misunderstandings about each other, and reveal their lingering feelings and vulnerabilities to each other at about the same time. In that way, they seem on equal ground. They both have regrets; they both long for each other; they both finally reveal their hearts in a way that is very satisfying for the reader.

But in Such a Girl, Jack makes an ardent pursuit of a very resistant, confused, and lost Kendall. It was hard to read about Jack (and other men in the novel as well) basically falling all over Kendall when she was such a mess. In Persuasion, Anne is full of regret and longing; Kendall just seemed angry, defensive, and confused most of the time, making it hard to root for her to reunite with a very patient and devoted Jack. The end, in particular, felt more like a concession than a reunion of true loves.

This is not to say Such a Girl should have mimicked the original novel in all things. I like modern re-tellings and am not an Austen purist. But I definitely wanted Kendall to exhibit more vulnerability and longing, and to have been more likeable. Not less flawed-- flawed heroines are plenty likeable-- but more sympathetic.

This is the story of Kendall who works at a hotel, Kendall's ex boyfriend; Jack ends up staying at the hotel with a new girlfriend. Kendall and Jack still have feelings for each other, and try not to act on those feelings. Kendall was also having a relationship with a married co-worker. She also made other decisions in the book that I thought was careless on her part. I guess the book was okay, I felt that something was missing; it was just okay for me.

Witty? Insightful? Seriously?

Are all these reviews from folks who've never worked in a place they quietly despised, with co-workers they're not all that interested in getting to know? Or is this novel for the ex-smoker who longs to have one more hit? WTF?

I found myself skipping parts where the MAIN characters came together - scenes too rare to believe.
I was astounded by the length of workplace/apartment nonsense that did little to move the story forward and annoyed with the general repetitiveness of the character interactions. If I wanted to experience this type of slow, painful drudgery, I'd just go get one of my old jobs back, move to a s**t apartment, and hang out with some of the serious DB's I knew in High School.

I didn't like it at all. It could be that I don't give a flying fig about the inner-workings of hotel phone operations, but I think it's more that I found so few of the characters compelling and so little of the story meaningful. If you've never had an introspective moment, then reading this will give you a pretty good feel for it. If you're relatively self-aware and you're hoping there'll be some profound and moving passage that touches you - you are out of luck.

Still, I have no-one but myself to blame for what just happened. I was the one who kept waiting for it to get better; kept turning page after boring page of introspective BS that led nowhere... but it was like a train wreck and I just couldn't turn away.

A good adaption of "Persuasion"? No. Really, it's not.

Is this an interracial romance? I have no idea since this writer is particularly adverse to giving a clear physical description her characters. This is the second book I've read by Karen Siplin and I assume this is not an oversight on her part. Some people might like this approach, I don't.

Why am I giving this two stars? I guess because the writer is technically proficient and has good ideas... and I'm hoping that her style will evolve.