Audiobook9 hours
American Girls
Written by Alison Umminger
Narrated by Jennifer Grace
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
She was looking for a place to land. Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood, and she's had it with her life at home. So Anna "borrows" her stepmom's credit card an runs away to Los Angeles, where her half-sister takes her in. But LA isn't quite the glamorous escape Anna had imagined. As Anna spends her days on TV and movie sets, she engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls-and although the violence in her own life isn't the kind that leaves physical scars, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present. In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the B-list in LA, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America-in short, on the B-list of life. Alison Umminger writes about girls, sex, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't, in a way not often seen in YA fiction.
Author
Alison Umminger
ALISON UMMINGER grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and as an undergraduate was the fourth woman to be elected president of The Harvard Lampoon. Today, she is a professor of English at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia, where she lives with her family. American Girls is her first novel.
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Reviews for American Girls
Rating: 3.7096774258064515 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
31 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/54.5 stars. Alison Umminger does a great job of capturing a teen girl's voice, and the narrator Anna will stick with me for some time. While the Manson girls material is dark and some moments are heartbreaking, this novel was laugh-out-loud funny in several places. It's both a fun read and a telling observation on America's obsessions with celebrity, beauty, Hollywood, crime, and sensationalism. At its best, AMERICAN GIRLS is up there with Rainbow Rowell's ELEANOR & PARK and Gary D. Schmidt's OKAY FOR NOW. Highly recommend.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Straightaway, I took to fifteen-year-old, Anna's voice. She runs away and lands in LA then hopes to stay with Delia, her twenty-something sister, right after "borrowing" her step-mother's credit card to pay for the plane ticket. Though not forgiven by her real mom (her step-mom and real mom are married) it's agreed Anna can spend the summer with Delia, who is a pretty but struggling actress. Anna is kept busy, and earns money, by doing research for one of Delia's former directors, Roger. However, Anna is left to stay on a shooting set with Delia's script-writer and now-boyfriend, Dex, because Delia is off working in secret with her former lover/director, Roger. The whole situation is fraught with complications. It is Roger who pays Anna for research on the Manson cult and Manson's AMERICAN GIRLS followers -- those who'd committed horrific crimes. While on set, Anna meets and has a crush on a teen idol star, Jeremy -- he's not a stereotypical teen idol-- he's considerate, likable, and enjoys Anna's humor, smarts, and cares about their friendship.This is a story about fame, celebrity, and what's superficial and what's of real value beneath. In my view, readers of all ages will enjoy Anna and the flawed, yet interesting, characters of this story. And how Anna wears and holds her own beauty during her summer in LA.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Anna, a fifteen year old fed up with her home life, steals her stepmother's credit card and buys a plane ticket to L.A., where her older sister Delia (an actress) lives. But once there, Anna realizes L.A. is no paradise, and the escape she seeks may be nowhere to be found.To pay back her stepmother, Anna takes a research job for her sister's ex-boyfriend, a director who wants to be inspired by the Manson Family, but knows very little about them. So while gaining insight into her sister's real life, and spending time on the set of a popular television show, Anna reads everything she can about Manson and, more specifically, the Manson Girls.The Manson plot line was what drew me to this book. As a true crime reader, I'm immediately interested in any fictional books that weave in true crime. And the parts centered around Anna's research were certainly interesting. In fact, they were the most interesting part of the book--which I think was actually a problem.I feel like I should have been much more invested in Anna, and Delia, and their family, and their relationships. But instead, I found myself hoping when I turned the page, the focus would be on Anna's research again.It's not that I didn't care at all about the characters, it was just that I found it difficult to like them. While we were certainly provided reasons the characters acted the way they did, they still came across, to me, as cynical and hard to connect with, and sometimes even especially cruel.Thinking about it, though, maybe that was the point? Anna frequently highlights connections between herself and the Manson Girls, who I would certainly describe as hard to connect with and very cruel. Maybe the readers are supposed to view Anna and her fellow characters as almost-Girls, human beings who manage to find that scrap of humanity and hold fast, rather than falling pray to someone promising them the world.I suspect I would have liked this book more if I hadn't recently read The Girls, a book I felt did a much better job at tackling a very similar subject. And while I did enjoy reading American Girls, I'm left wanting more from Anna and her fictional cohorts. I want them to achieve that growth that comes from truly learning from history's mistakes.