Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Fiction
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3.8 • 52 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Elissa Schappell, “a diva of the encapsulating phrase, capable of conveying a Pandora’s box of feeling in a single line” (The New York Times Book Review) delivers eight provocative, darkly funny linked stories that map America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day.
Blueprints for Building Better Girls delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother—mapping America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This raw and engaging collection, Schappell's second (after Use Me), follows a cast of girls and women as they navigate relationships with each other, their mothers, and men across several decades. The strongest stories are those about gutsy girls who aren't "afraid to throw the trick," as one character's gymnastics coach describes her in "Out of the Blue and into the Black." Schappell endeavors to show the complex vulnerabilities behind some of the choices made by girls casually judged as sluts, as in "Monsters of the Deep" and "I'm Only Going to Tell You This Once," and this is where she is at her best; less successful, by comparison, are the more diffuse stories that depict the dynamics between mothers and daughters, wives and husbands. Each story adds new perspectives of characters or events chronicled earlier in the book, allowing Schappell to create a bigger, more textured and complicated world than is usually found in collections. This, combined with the energy of the writing and the dark wit of these characters, will endear the book to Schappell's audience and fans of Lorrie Moore and Maile Meloy.
Customer Reviews
fair collection...
There's nothing WRONG with this collection... but there's nothing particularly striking about it either. I love stories about troubled females, and so I thought I'd love this. Instead, these stories were not much more than inoffensive. Schappell's prose is good, but never particularly admirable. Her characters aren't fresh, and seem to take cliches and then add a detail or two to the cliche, as if to remedy their clichedness. The plot arcs often fall flat, and rely on dramatic standards -- rape, death, etc. -- instead of earning an emotional response in their own right, through things like good writing or character development. The most disappointing thing though, for me, was the fact that her characters were all just kind of sad. And not tragically so, or uniquely so, or interestingly so... a bland, almost pathetic, sadness. It makes one wonder if Schappell would have garnered attention at all if she wasn't who she happens to be.
overall book
Yeah this book was amazing. You will find a little part of you in each of the characters, very emotional.
I don't cry and I don't read. I read the whole book and I cried.
So you should get this amazing book. I got the hard copy in Manhattan :)
Love this book so much
Brilliant
Beautifully woven together. Complicated lives women all experience. This is why I studied English. I am jealous that I will never be able to write this well, but can't wait for more. It is one of those books that you can't put down and don't want to end. Thank you for sharing your talent.