Local Girls
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Told from Gretel Samuelson's sly and knowing perspective, Local Girls charts her progress as she navigates from childhood to the brink of womanhood, picking her way though the tragedies and absurdities of everyday life in a family which is rocked by divorce and disaster, bad judgement and fierce attachments. Her father has left them, her chain-smoking mother, Franny, is falling apart and refuses to learn the simple lessons of life, her perfect brother has fatal flaws, and even her best friend Jill - blonde, enviable and beautiful - is moving too fast into the unfathomable world of women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hoffman's chosen form of a novelistic group of short stories--all of which share the same family characters--lends itself nicely to the abridged audio format, in which the fragmentation seems a willful form of stylized narration. The audio's producers have augmented this effect: two narrators, the airy Merlington and the pragmatic Vigesaa, play off against each other in tone as they trade stories. In the opener, Gretel Samuelson tells of her family's troubles in confidential, diarylike schoolgirl terms. In later offerings, omniscient descriptions are given of mother Franny's fight against cancer and brother Jason's disintegration as a heroin addict. Though dysfunctional family fiction seems standard fare these days, Hoffman's highly individual knack for creating a sense of specific atmosphere is uncanny and unique, a quality that translates especially well in spoken form. Based on the 1999 Putnam hardcover.
