Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel
by Alice Munro
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice MunroEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-02-13
ISBN: 0375707492
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel
Book Review: Changing times, changing girls and women
Summary: 5 Stars
Alice Munro is widely known as a short-story writer. However, in her career there supposedly be a novel: "Lives of Girls and Women", first published in 1971. In one of her rare interviews - to "The NY Times" in the 1980s - she says that to her view this book is more a series of interconnected stories than a novel per se. It is not because she says so, but anyone familiar of the structure of a regular novel is able to know that this is not really one of them.
There are elements that belong to the novel dynamics - the same narrator, the same group of characters and so on - but, then again, they could belong to short stories either. As a matter of fact, each of the `chapter' of "Lives of Girls and Women" ends in itself. In other words, each of them has a beginning, middle, and an end. However, it is not the vital to decided whether this book is a novel or a collection of short stories. Either one will not change how brilliant it is.
The second book published by Alice Munro, this is one of her best accomplished works as a whole. Her posterior collections have some of her best short stories ever - but as a whole they do not keep the same level. However in this one, none of the chapters is better or worse than the following one.
Throughout a 40-year career, Alice Munro has established herself as one of the most important writers currently working. Her stories deal with ordinary people, whose lives would not be supposedly interesting. But, in her pages, this lives become unforgettable.
In "Lives of Girls and Women" we follow the upbringing of a girl in rural Canada - this could be an autobiographical book, but it is not the point to discover it. We accompany Del Jordan since her childhood until her days as a young woman expecting to go to the university and chance the pattern in her family's life.
"Lives of Girls and Women" are, after all, a book about changing times. At some point, Del's mother notices that `there is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women'. More than thirty years after its first publishing, the book proves that those changes came to stay.
Summary of Lives of Girls and Women: A Novel
The only novel from Alice Munro-award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman--is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women-her mother, an agnostic, opinionted woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence.
Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
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