Lucky Girls: Stories (Hardcover)

by Nell Freudenberger (Author) "I had often imagined meeting Mrs. Chawla, Arun's mother..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, San Francisco, Sunder Nagar (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Nell Freudenberger knows from lucky girls. She has had a lot of luck herself in her short writing career: Her debut story was featured in The New Yorker, with a glossy full-color author photo alongside; a quick book contract ensued, on the strength of that one published story; and now comes a debut collection full of stories that are actually good. The Lucky Girls collected here are far-flung Americans, young women trying to figure out where they belong in the world. In "The Tutor," teenage Julia and her businessman father are living in Bombay; her mother has returned to the United States. Julia crams for the SATs with her tutor Zubin, smokes cigarettes, and goes to nightclubs; her father hovers at home. Freudenberger gets just right the moments when Julia and her father find themselves alone together, trying to be a family: "It was just the two of them at the table then; even with the leaves taken out and stored against the wall in the coat closet, they had to half-stand in order to pass the soup." Too, she knows the upper-class world of which she writes. In "The Orphan," Mandy's parents and brother come to visit her in Thailand, where she is working with "AIDS babies." Mandy's brother Josh appears, and Freudenberger skewers his type, neatly, in a sentence: "Josh looks like someone coming out of trench warfare in the Balkans, rather than college in Maine." But Freudenberger isn't telling easy rich-kid stories. She's forever pushing her narration. In "The Tutor," we hear from Zubin, an overeducated Indian, as well as from Julia. "The Orphan," in turn, is told by Mandy's mom, a woman bewildered by yet proud of her daughter's choice to remain in Thailand. Freudenberger's stories are cosmopolitan, expansive, and richly detailed, a beguiling combination of qualities. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
Freudenberger saw her first story, "Lucky Girls," published in the New Yorker's 2001 debut fiction issue and subsequently received a reported six-figure sum to round out the collection with a bunch more (at that time unwritten) works. The gamble has paid off, at least from a critical perspective: the five long stories in this collection are thoughtful and entertaining. Most take place in Asia and feature Americans living abroad. In the title piece, a young American painter recalls her long affair with a married Indian man. The man has died unexpectedly, and the story traces the development of the narrator's antagonistic yet moving relationship with the mother of her late lover. "The Orphan" is a witty story of a middle-aged couple who, along with their college-age son, go to Thailand for Christmas to visit their daughter and break the news of their impending divorce. The daughter, who works at a Bangkok hospital for orphaned AIDS babies, finds her parents benighted and so... Western, while her brother announces that he belongs to the Cool Rich Kids club, whose members seek to give their parents' money away ("it's this chance to endorse the more radical causes that people your age wouldn't support"). In "The Tutor," a romance blossoms between an Indian SAT coach and a Prada-wearing American teenager living in Bombay who wants nothing more than to get into UC-Berkeley. Many of these tales concern the slow birth and disintegration of romantic relationships, although some lack pull, due to their one-dimensional characters. Freudenberger is more inventive and piquant when she probes characters' relationships to their adopted homelands-which, she shows, are often more passionate and grounded than their ties to the people in their lives.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (August 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060088796
• ISBN-13: 978-0060088798
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,089,301 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wish I'd like it, but..., October 30, 2003

By	Jill Sterling (Crested Butte, CO) - See all my reviews

It's funny--most of the positive reviews for this book seem to be from the New York area--where the author is from--I feel fairly certain they're friends of hers. The strories here are just dismally mediocre, the "musings" of the socially privileged and insulated..the author just doesn't seem to have anything to say. It's certainly not envy that provokes me to write this--I am a reader, not a writer--I cheer every time a good book comes into the world but this one made me sigh with frustration. It's just...flat and amateurish. I think the so-called "jealous" reviews below are more bewilderment that this author has gotten so much unwarranted media attention when there are so many worthier candidates...sigh--better luck next time.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment, April 15, 2004

By	Christopher Legras "TravisOfTheCosmos" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was excited to read Fruedenberger's first full book - having heard a great deal about her after her piece in the New Yorker. I settled in to enjoy it on a chilly Boston evening, and....well, I was surprised that the basic elements were there, but nothing more. The character development is actually quite good, but there aren't any characters that we really want to care about. There's little in the way of spatial or temporal dynamism, rather a sort of a to b to c progression that offers no challenges to the reader. The prose is tight, but predictable. And I quite frankly can't handle too many boilerplate metaphors.

I wish I could offer a better review, but there's no soul in this book. And I also hate to agree with some of the bitter sods who don't like the book because they perceive the author as some silver spoon.

By all means, try this book. I have a difficult time with much of what is published today (I'm one of the few that found glaring faults in 'Cold Mountain', for example). I hope I'm wrong...

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I Am Disappointed., January 31, 2004

By A Customer

I really am. I didn't buy this book- thank God- but I've waited since we've acquired it at our public library- about eight months- to check it out. Let me tell you- it's like opening a Christmas present that has sat under the tree for a month, mysterious and promising, only to find that it's something "practical" or a "great bargain". And of course Lucky Girls was neither of these, even. The writing was bland and too safe-side, completely without imagination. Even the subjects were bland. Freudenberger managed to take a whole country with more allure than 97 percent of the places on this planet and water it down to a mere setting, not much different than my back yard Suburbia (even with all the references to poverty- which were just that: references). And Freudenberger doesn't connect herSELF to her own characters- how can she expect us, as readers, to connect to them?

I predict (and I'll eat my words if things work out to the contrary) that she'll have a novel out within a year and a half. There will be gobs of hype about it, with a lot of false assumptions about the warm reception of her collection of stories to fool readers into feeling they've been waiting for this novel forEVER. And it may even be a bestseller, but the novel will recieve such half-convinced reviews that we'll not be hearing from Freudenberger for a long time after that- or until she's at last found her strengths and weaknesses and worked them out- artistically, that is.

And, by the way, she's a very lovely girl. And sex sells. And all's fair in the publishing industry. The truth obviously comes out- as we've seen just in this small space on Amazon- when people concentrate on the content, but people like Freudenberger need all the head start they can get when they write so dispassionately.