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A review by tjgreads
The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow
3.0
A dear friend of mine recommended this one after she read it for her all-women book club, saying that the relationships among these 10 women reminded her of our friendship with a group of girls from college.
I thought this book was very interesting, but I was drawn more to the little scientific bits about studies on women's friendships than the relationships of the women featured. I found it a little difficult to buy that a group that large (10 now, 11 as children - one girl passed away in her twenties) could really all be that close to one another, and the more I read of the book the more convinced I was that there were powerful connections between some of the women within the group, but as a whole, not every single woman was great friends with every other woman. I guess this is to be expected.
I did think the story was a good one and it really made me miss my good friends. We are all spread out around the country and communicate mainly by e-mail and text message, which is similar to the Ames girls.
Another note - the author, Jeffrey Zaslow, had an odd voice at times as he was describing the friendship of this group of women. It was clear he was an outsider, and his point of view could be strangely technical, which, for me, threw off the pace of the book. His at-a-distance, documentary kind of style really wrung a lot of the passion out of the topic, and I think a lot of the beauty of this story got lost in the telling. I liked the story of these women and their journey together, but I sensed that the magic was lost in the way it was told.
I thought this book was very interesting, but I was drawn more to the little scientific bits about studies on women's friendships than the relationships of the women featured. I found it a little difficult to buy that a group that large (10 now, 11 as children - one girl passed away in her twenties) could really all be that close to one another, and the more I read of the book the more convinced I was that there were powerful connections between some of the women within the group, but as a whole, not every single woman was great friends with every other woman. I guess this is to be expected.
I did think the story was a good one and it really made me miss my good friends. We are all spread out around the country and communicate mainly by e-mail and text message, which is similar to the Ames girls.
Another note - the author, Jeffrey Zaslow, had an odd voice at times as he was describing the friendship of this group of women. It was clear he was an outsider, and his point of view could be strangely technical, which, for me, threw off the pace of the book. His at-a-distance, documentary kind of style really wrung a lot of the passion out of the topic, and I think a lot of the beauty of this story got lost in the telling. I liked the story of these women and their journey together, but I sensed that the magic was lost in the way it was told.