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A review by plumeriade
American Girls by Alison Umminger
4.0
i think the manson girl connection could have been more in depth but other than that i liked this a lot! lots of truth about how we value and punish girls/young women.
the protagonist has two moms! this is actually pretty great, and Anna's mom is not perfect but she's not like, terrible. Anna resents her a lot for giving attention to her little brother, and pulling her out of her private school, which is what prompts her to run away to LA. Anna doesn't have a huge transformation but she does realize that her mom was dealing with some stuff on her own and that she may have made it harder because of her behavior, which is something (and realistic).
anyway there's a really funny part (i mean, to me. it's not actually funny-funny). after Anna's sister Delia has her mom watch some horror movie:
other quotes i liked:
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about three-fourths of the way through Delia is at a director ex-boyfriend's house with Anna and the ex starts praising Roman Polanski. Delia goes off, rightly, which was GREAT to see. then Anna asks what is really the point of the entire book:
this isn't an action-packed book but there's a lot of thought in it.
the protagonist has two moms! this is actually pretty great, and Anna's mom is not perfect but she's not like, terrible. Anna resents her a lot for giving attention to her little brother, and pulling her out of her private school, which is what prompts her to run away to LA. Anna doesn't have a huge transformation but she does realize that her mom was dealing with some stuff on her own and that she may have made it harder because of her behavior, which is something (and realistic).
anyway there's a really funny part (i mean, to me. it's not actually funny-funny). after Anna's sister Delia has her mom watch some horror movie:
"She says, 'I can't have sex since I saw that movie. It's disgusting and it's made me realize that sex with men is violent and predatory. I'm not sure that I can ever have sex with any man again."
other quotes i liked:
When we finished The Great Gatsby, the last day of class, he asked, all sly and crafty, 'While we're on the topic of things prohibited: is there any chance that Nick Carraway was in love with Gatsy?' You could practically hear the snickering, not that it was funny. I technically had two moms, and I could have told all of them that it wasn't exactly stand up comedy. But Mr. Haygood waited the laughter out, and by the end we wondered if maybe he wasn't right.
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Nothing but a body. The line bothered me because when I was reading about the murders, so much more seemed to be written about the Manson girls, and Charles Manson, than about the victims themselves...[Sharon Tate] went from being a body on a screen to a body in a bag.
about three-fourths of the way through Delia is at a director ex-boyfriend's house with Anna and the ex starts praising Roman Polanski. Delia goes off, rightly, which was GREAT to see. then Anna asks what is really the point of the entire book:
"Why do you think it is that Roman Polanski does this awful thing and doesn't even feel sorry about it, but he gets to live his life? And you have these women, the Manson girls, who did this really horrible thing when they were young and stupid and on drugs, and they never get to spend one day not paying for it, even though most of them have spent the rest of their lives trying to do something to, I don't know, atone?"
this isn't an action-packed book but there's a lot of thought in it.