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Summary: Great Book For Adults and Young Adults!
Review: Alice Hoffman is a truly talented author. In Local Girls, she gives you the life of a girl growing up with her parents divorced, her brother going on a downfall from High School, her best friend pregant,and her mother recently gets depressed and sick. Alice Hoffman shows a young girl growing into a woman as she faces these impossible challeges, looking for help throughout the way. I enjoyed this book very much, but I was displeased with the some of the words the author used in the last chapter. I would reccomded this book to adults, and mature young adults.
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Summary: Life in Long Island
Review: Alice Hoffman truly is a great author. She made me feel as if I was there. Gretel, the smart one is the main character in this story was an inspiration to the way she looks at life. She doesn't take things for granted and she sees everything as an oppurtunity. Gretel's best friend Jill is the beautiful one. Jill and Gretel really need each other to in life, they really look up to each other in different ways. Frances, Gretel's mother is diagnosed with cancer after her and husband had got a divorce. Jason, Gretel's brother ends up ruining his life by getting deep into drugs. Everyone in Long Island is basically looking for love. They all find it in the weirdest ways. This book leaves you hanging and wanting to know more.
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Summary: A reminder of my childhood
Review: Although Local Girls started and ended a good book the book is vague about a lot of topics! Throughout the story, strength is demonstrated by overcoming painful situations in life. Alice Hoffman leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader although the plot was good it lacked clarity and details. The author changes narrators often and although it can throw you off it can give you a different perspective to the feelings of the characters in the book!
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Summary: A story of life's ups and downs
Review: First of all, this author does a tremendous job of putting a book together that's very hard to set down. It's very quick read giving the reader a feeling of reading a girl's journal and developing into a story as the girl, Gretel, grows up. The relationships between Gretel and her mother and her cousin and her bestfriend,Jill, are the center of this book.
This is a story of real life. There's the brother who has everything going for him, including a chance to go to Harvard. Gretel watches the strength that her mother shows in the open but hears her mother's emotional pain at night. Gretel is brought up around strong women and knows how to survive and be a strong woman herself.
I enjoyed this book tremendously and will recommend it to anyone looking for a very good book to read.
Gretel and the people in her life are very relateable. She endures loosing family members, money struggles, resentful teen years.
Upon finishing this book there is a moral to the story. Money and social position don't always equal happiness and love.
Do pick this book up and read it. It's a very quickstory with a lot to say.
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Summary: Depressing Read
Review: I had been meaning to try an Alice Hoffman book for a long time. I'd heard so many great things about her writing, and the premises of her novels sound like my cup of tea. I don't think I made the right choice to sample her work with LOCAL GIRLS. Had I known this was really a book of short stories, I definitely would have passed it by. I'm not a fan of the short story format. I missed the flow of a novel and the richness of detail that is just not there in a short story. It was obvious that these stories were meant to stand on their own. Each new "chapter" re-explained details of earlier chapters as though I hadn't just read them. I found this quite annoying.My poor choice, however, has not dissuaded me from trying another of Hoffman's works. All that I had heard about her writing is true. Her style is warm and her characterization gorgeous. Even though these were short stories, I could still empathize with Gretel and her family. I would have enjoyed a true novel about these people much more, though.
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Summary: This little book is a gem!!
Review: I have read Alice Hoffman before but somehow I managed to skip over this one. The way she writes captures the image of whatever is happening in the story or with the characters. I found myself back tracking just to hear the magical way she had with her verse and words,whether it was the night or the heat or what the heart was saying, I felt it. Don't let anything keep you from this one. When an author can take an ordinary story and weave this kind of spell it is special. I wanted to read it slowly to savor it, but I didn't I read it quickly indulging myself. As I neared the ending late at night I purposely put it down to save myself a small treat for the morning. It's a keeper too I won't be letting this one go!
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Summary: HOFFMAN'S RICH PROSE IS LEAVENED WITH GLISTENING WIT
Review: In rich prose leavened with glistening wit and rueful perspicacity Alice Hoffman brings us her 12th novel, Local Girls. Skillfully interweaving a series of related vignettes, offered by alternating narrators, the author divines the hearts and minds of a family plagued by loss yet sustained by love. The Local Girls for whom we come to care are Gretel Samuelson, her mother, Franny, her mother's cousin, Margot, "who got a divorce last summer and changed the color of her hair to give herself an emotional lift," and Gretel's best friend, Jill. Franny is also divorced, miserably so, spending her nights on a quilt beside her daughter's bed. Home is Franconia, the suburb in which they were "doomed to live." It is here that 12-year-old Gretel and Jill sneak out at night to exact vengeance upon those who have offended them - they write with pieces of coal on a tattle-tale shopkeeper's garage door, pour rancid buttermilk into a strict teacher's garbage cans, and spread paint on the prized car of a father who groped them when they babysat. But despite the rewards of retaliation, as Gretel relates, it was a bad summer. Her brother Jason, handsome, ingratiating, and winner of every science award, is headed for Harvard and a brilliant career. But he changed. In Gretel's words, he "appeared to have undergone a lobotomy." He'd "gotten himself a job at the Food Star, in the deli department, and something had shifted. He was starting to seem comfortable in the deli." He also grew comfortable with drugs, eventually stealing to support his heroin habit. "What was happening to our family, anyway?" Gretel asks. Her mother becomes ill; her father remarries. Her home is a shambles; the kitchen gives her the shivers as Margot and Franny are beginning a catering business. "They had both recovered from cancer scares, failed marriages, and lost hope; in their opinion, dirt could wait. That was also the summer Jill became cynical: "Before that, before all the sickness and heat, she was the sweetest girl you'd ever met. But lately she saw the dark underside of everything...........Everything was bad news in Jill's opinion. Everything was a game you couldn't win." So it would seem, for Jill discovers she is pregnant by Eddie, "the boy that everyone wanted, but not for keeps." "Gorgeous and stupid," he is described as one who hadn't been told the earth was round and thought Abraham Lincoln was a brand of toothpaste. When her mother again falls ill, Gretel "couldn't help but think that the world was a crueler place than anyone had ever dared to suggest. You might even find yourself believing that fair itself was a meaningless concept, one which would only deceive you, in the end." Lives spliced with comedy and tragedy are the heart of Local Girls. It is a tribute to the power of family, and the strength of redeeming love. Once again, Alice Hoffman has proven herself to be an outstanding chronicler of life's pitfalls and joys.
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Summary: A great beach read!
Review: It is always a pleasure to read a good book. Alice Hoffman is a literary "witch" who weaves a little magic into each of her novels. Although this is not one of her best novels (try TURTLE MOON or HERE ON EARTH)---it's really a little too short to explore any of the character's psyche or motivations---Ms. Hoffman has given the reader another pager turner full of glorious prose. She makes ordinary life extraordinary in each of her novels, and she has fast become my favorite author.
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Summary: Another Hoffman Gem
Review: Like another reviewer, I had somehow missed this book of Alice Hoffman's. What an unexpected treat when I found it! This collection of related stories with alternating narrators was wonderful and forced me to use my imagination to figure out what went on between the stories and think about the details that Hoffman had left out. I would have loved to have read more about this family, but perhaps the author intended to leave us wondering. The strong women in this book overshadow the weak men in every way. Gretel's father, her brother, and Sonny offer no support to the women in the book. Gretel endures and triumphs, mostly on her own....a perfect example of that saying "what does not kill you will make you strong".. Like all of Hoffman's books, this was an emotionally moving story but with a few touches (fewer than usual) of her magical realism. And, as usual, the language is PURE magic!
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Summary: A collection of short stories..
Review: This book was just that...a novel put together on short stories. While the stories connected and showed the life of Gretel who grows up throughout the book, I just didn't feel that there was enough development of the entire story or the characters. The story is about conquering life..the will to live despite the hard circumstances that exist and I wanted to know more about what motivated the characters, especially Gretel's brother Jason. I realize that with this sort of writing formula you must infer a lot of what goes on but I just needed more depth to the characters. I preferred Here on Earth to this one. I will seek out more novels by this author.
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