Anthropology of an American Girl
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Falling in love, maintaining fragile family relationships and growing to understand the incremental effect of every experience, Hilary Thayer Hamann's coming-of-age novel is a depiction of sexual and intellectual awakening against the backdrop of East Hampton in the 1970s and moneyed, high-pressured Manhattan in the 1980s.
As Evie Auerbach surrenders to the dazzling emotional highs of love and the crippling loneliness of heartbreak, she strives to reconcile her identity with the constraints that all relationships inherently place on us. Though she stumbles and strains against social conventions, Evie remains a strong yet sensitive observer of the world around her, often finding beauty and meaning in unexpected places.
More than just a love story, Anthropology of an American Girl is an extraordinary piece of writing, original in its vision and thrilling in its execution.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
American writer Hilary Thayer Hamann’s first novel creeps up on you, pulling you into a hypnotic meditation on the stifling burdens—as well as the unexpected wonders—of growing up as a young woman. We follow Eveline Auerbach through her last year of high school and beyond, marvelling at her alternately clueless and astute meditations on friendship, lust, purpose and the lives of the people around her. Anthropology of an American Girl burrows under your skin and makes the mundane details of teenage life shimmer with significance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If publishers could figure out a way to turn crack into a book, it'd read a lot like this. Originally a self-published cult hit in 2003 (since reedited), Hamann's debut traces the sensual, passionate, and lonely interior of a young woman artist growing up in windswept East Hampton at the end of the 1970s. The book begins as a two-pronged tragedy befalls 17-year-old narrator Eveline: her best friend's mother (more maternal than her own) dies, and Eveline is raped by two high school students. Her brutalized interior, exquisitely rendered by Hamann, leads Eveline to a series of self-realizations that bears obvious comparison to that iconic nonconformist Holden Caulfield. The difference, though, is Eveline's femininity threatens to subsume her fragility. Over the course of the book, she falls deeply in love with a stormy figure who helps bring her to disturbing conclusions. Eveline bent on self-destruction but capable of deep passion, stifled by circumstance but constantly blossoming is a marvelously complex and tragic figure of disconnection, startlingly real and exposed at all times.
