Bennington Girls Are Easy
A Novel
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2.1 • 18 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Chosen as one of "Summer's Best Books" by PEOPLE MAGAZINE: "Suprisingly insightful and seriously fun."
One of O MAGAZINE's "Season's Best"
A COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE "July Reads" Pick
Named one of REFINERY 29's “21 New Authors to Watch” in 2015
Charlotte Silver dazzles with a ruefully funny coming-of-age novel that follows two recent Bennington grads who are determined to make it in the Big Apple.
Bennington College, founded in 1932 as a suitable refuge for the wayward daughters of good families, maintains its saucy reputation for attracting free spirits. There, acres outnumber students, the faculty is composed of fading hippie and clothing is largely optional. Or, as J. D. Salinger put it in Franny and Zooey: a Bennington-type "looked like she'd spent the whole train ride in the john, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress."
Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst met in high school but cement what they ardently believe will be everlasting friendship on Bennington's idyllic Vermont campus. Graduation sees Sylvie moving to New York City, where, later on their twenties, Cassandra joins her. These early, delirious years are spent decorating their Fort Greene apartment with flea market gems, dating "artists", and trying to figure out what they're doing with their lives.
The girls are acutely and caustically observant of the unique rhythms of the city but tone deaf to their own imperfections, which eventually drives a wedge between them. Equal parts heartfelt and hilarious, Bennington Girls Are Easy is a novel about female friendships—how with one word from a confidante can lift you up or tear you down—and how difficult it is to balance someone else's devastatingly funny lapses in judgment with your own professional and personal missteps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Silver's novel is about a pair of irresponsible Bennington grads as they navigate their 20s back home in Boston and New York City. Cassandra Puffin who likes her men "upperclass and intellectual, with a fine, sadistic verbal edge" and her bestie, the charismatic, selfish, and prescient Sylvie Furst, graduated Bennington in 2003 lacking any ambition other than Sylvie's intense desire to move to NYC. She accomplishes her goal by using another Bennington grad, only to suffer the consequences of her choice later. Cassandra stays in Boston for some time, but moves into Sylvie's Brooklyn apartment several years later. They go through their days working odd jobs, and Sylvie more readily adapts because of her entrepreneurial bent. Sadly, as the 2008 financial crisis hits, Cassandra does not, creating an interesting dynamic between the two. The book's pace is too slow, and the reader can never really reconcile the fact that Cassandra and Sylvie don't really seem to like each other much, but Silver (Summer Invitation) excels at characterization and deftly blends tragedy and comedy.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing.
The characters are not engaging and don't appear to have any redeeming qualities. Their superficial lives may be the point of this book, but I found it rather banal and disagreeable. It makes those eastern schools sound as pretentious and self-important as is their reputation.
Splintered Shards of Glass
Having graduated from Bennington College 35 years ago with a daughter now attending-both dance majors and flourishing in NYC, I found the account of the characters over-sexualized, catty, and demeaning, stereotyping Bennington girls as sexy, uneducated failures that evolve into dysfunctional women contributing nothing, but artless fraudulence and pushing boundaries of conventional sex. Fern, still not tarnished by NYC, being flippantly killed off in the last pages hit by a car on Park Avenue on a breath mint errand for Cassandra about to kiss a classmate's father...really? The two modern dancers killed by the glass window fallout in the performing arts building were symbolically iconized, but their classmates were shredded in this plotless depiction. How does this serve the public image of upcoming Bennington girls? Was the writing this book a means to process the convoluted sub-society of a very small artsy enclave where a lot of cutting edge creativity emerges from and make a mockery of it?
Bennington Girls Are Easy
Not a fun read, and quite depressing. It is all about shallow, easy girls.