[.uk] Girl Talk (ISBN 0743400836)

baggott's poetry is better:
I'm afraid this novel didn't work for me. The characters were flat and it felt cliche. The biggest annoyance, however, was the way Baggott recycled her images from her poetry. While I was reading Girl Talk, I was also reading her book of poems This County of Mothers. While the images in the poems were fresh and surprising, when I discovered them nearly word for word in her novel I felt cheated; that was a cheap shot.

a great read:
Girl Talk is a very good book! Lissy is 30, single and pregnant which is the same position her mother was in once. In Girl Talk, Lissy tell the tale of the summer that never existed. It's the summer her father ran off with another woman for the summer. Lissy and her mom go and stay with the aunt and uncle of her mom's first love. Lissy does a lot of growing up over the summer. She finds out the truth about her father and her mother tells her her story. Although the book jumps from one story to another, it isn't hard to follow and had me laughing out loud at points.

Never believe a truth until someone insists.....:
....Or, something like that. Anyway, advice such as that is near the end of the book. I really liked this author's fresh, different perspective on life and her way of showing us how Lissy blossomed into her own being. Told in a candid, matter-of-fact style, this author hands you fiction that is in so many ways non- but, the real deal for all of us. I feel the book definitely gets much better at the last few pages and am relieved to watch everything finally merge. Life is soooo not perfect, and Lissy shows us this from the get-go. Oddly enough, she paves an eloquence for what she's learned and been told. I never like giving details about a book via a review, so forgive me if this sounds like I'm jumping around. I was satisfied with the book on many levels, and, having never read her before, will most likely pick her work up again. Unique style here of the typical coming-of-age saga. Don't pass it up.

Maybe a little closer to 3.5 stars:
I liked this book especially the mother & daughter road trip concept. It's a good story and fairly well developed characters. However, I dont understand why she had to call the "other-woman" the: red-headed bank teller, every time she was mentioned, it was so annoying. I did sense a poetic quality other reviewers mentioned. Story-wise, The Dad leaving seemed completely out of character and having life go back to normal after- is just weird. It didn't work even though that was the entire story. I think there was just something not natural or realistic about what happened/how it happened (the mother's life and the dad's affair) that really kept this book from being 5 stars. Lissy was a good main character, I liked her but she could have had more going on and less about the mother. I liked the mother's previous love story but I wanted more. I would have liked to get to know Lissy better and have had the story maybe be a little bit longer and more thorough. Also, I live in New Hampshire so it was cool to have a story take place here.

GIRL TALK is wildly funny.:
At its heart, GIRL TALK is about a great fear shared by many women coming of age --- becoming our mothers. It shows how it always happens when you least expect it and that there is no avoiding it. But most importantly, by the end of Julianna Baggott's stunning debut novel, one has learned to accept this fear with grace and dignity. Just like Mom would want. Lissy Jablonski is almost 30. She is an ad executive in Manhattan. Her first love has come to stay with her and ends up marrying her stripper ex-roomate --- and Lissy is pregnant by her married ex-lover. The power of these events culminates in a comic flashback to what is know throughout the book as "the summer that never happened." Lissy was 15 years old that summer. Her father ran off with a redheaded bank teller, and she began to realize that everything she knew about herself and her family was a lie. Amid a cast of vividly drawn characters, Lissy begins to come to terms with the secrets revealed during her comforting "girl talks" with her mother. In an attempt to spare her daughter the humiliation of her father's moral misstep, Dotty Jablonski takes Lissy away from her New Hampshire life to the only refuge she can think of: the home of her rich college friend, Juniper Fiske. The Fiske family, including children Piper and Church, are possibly the oddest refuge for the Jablonski women during that fateful summer, considering that Lissy's parents met at Juniper's wedding. They are the type of rich people we all know: Piper is teenaged and sullen; Juniper, valium-addicted and high strung; and Church is boyishly handsome and impressionable. Perhaps the most compassionately drawn character, Church Fiske is the kind of guy that every girl has had a crush on, the kind of guy that stays with you years later, still holding onto the part of your heart that believed love was easy. When Church joins Lissy and her mother at their next refuge, his impressionable soul becomes forever wary of the life of excess he is used to. He falls in love with everything middle class and sets the tone for the man he will become. It is also in the home of Dino and Ruby Pantuliano that Lissy gets to know more about her real father, Anthony Pantuliano. A dwarfish man with a rather impressive body, Anthony is the first --- and seemingly only --- true-love Lissy's mother ever had. Although Anthony does not know he is her father, Lissy becomes attached to the persona of him. She has both been raised by a man who loves her greatly, and created as a result of a great love. The importance of these two men in her life finds its origin during that summer that never happened. Throughout the stay with the Soprano-like Patulianos, Lissy begins to form the basis of what her therapist refers to as an Electra Complex and to learn to understand why her mother is who she is. GIRL TALK is wildly funny and benefited much in this reading by being set in an easily identifiable era. With references to WHAM! and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, it becomes easy to interpose oneself with Lissy. Statements such as "My earliest word association with president is crook," make the novel both timely and timeless. We could be talking about Nixon, or anyone for that matter. Although the prose is not as lyrical as expected, it creates for Lissy a strong, clear voice. The characterization is topnotch in this novel, and although Anthony Pantuliano is drawn as less-than-perfect, the novel benefits from his failings. Lissy's mother Dotty is at times a bit of a martyr, but aren't all of our mothers? When you boil it all down, each of us can only hope to become our mothers in as graceful a way as Lissy Jablonski. May we all learn to accept the good and bad that comes with that transition, and may we all make it a bit easier for those around us with a little "girl talk." --- Reviewed by Josette Kurey