The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
by Melissa Banks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Melissa BanksEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-03-29
ISBN: 0143035479
Number of pages: 274
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Book Review: Witty Slacker Seeks Love
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked up this book at Barnes & Noble without knowing anything about it, and read it without any expectations. This is a wonderful read, a deceptively simple book. I found the author's voice engaging and funny, and her writing style clear and graceful. For instance, comparing the former summer house in Nantucket with the current bland one on the Jersey shore, the main character Jane muses: "You could feel the ghosts in THAT house, scaring you in the best way. If there were any ghosts in THIS one, they weren't moaning about husbands lost at sea, but slamming doors over modern, trivial matters, such as not being able to go waterskiing."
For those - like me - who know nada about chick lit or the modern dating scene, it's an anthropological adventure into how the other half finds love.
The connected short-story structure is pretty great. However, it's too bad the editor didn't convince Ms. Banks to delete the middle story "The Best Possible Light." It sends the connected-short-stories-as-novel structure into a tailspin of confusion.
The stories range from gossipy to serious-as-cancer, yet the narrator's tone remains sly, eccentric -- or how about -- quirkily insightful. The final story is funny and witty - a perfect ending. You close the book, place it on the towel next to your lotion and sunglasses and, the words and images fading swiftly like the remnants of a pleasant dream, race across the sand for a splash in the salty ocean waves.
Overall, a fun, not too demanding read, and an enjoyable re-read. Does everything have to be War and Peace?
Summary of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Hailed by critics as the debut of a major literary voice, The Girls? Guide to Hunting and Fishing dazzled and delighted readers and topped bestseller lists nationwide. Now, in anticipation of her upcoming new work of fiction, The Wonder Spot, Penguin is publishing Melissa Bank?s bestseller in a mass-market format to reach an even wider audience.Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls? Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships as well as the treacherous waters of the workplace. With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skillfully teases out issues of the heart, puts a new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it?s like to be a young woman coming of age in America today.
Jane Rosenal, the narrator of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is wise beyond her years. Not that that's saying much--since none of her elders, with the exception of her father, is particularly wise. At the age of 14, Jane watches her brother and his new girlfriend, searching for clues for how to fall in love, but by the end of the summer she's trying to figure out how not to fail in love. At twice that age, Jane quickly internalizes How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, even though that retro manual is ruining her chances at happiness. In the intervening years, Melissa Bank's heroine struggles at love and work. The former often seems indistinguishable from the latter, and her experiences in book publishing inspire little in the way of affection. As Jane announces in "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine": "I'd been a rising star at H----- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane."
Bank's first collection has a beautiful, true arc, and all the sophistication and control her heroine could ever desire. In "The Floating House," Jane and her boyfriend, Jamie, visit his ex-girlfriend in St. Croix, and right from the start she can't stop mimicking her beautiful competitor, in a notably idiotic fashion. "I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive," she realizes--one of several thousand of Bank's ruefully funny phrases. But even as Jane clowns around, desperately trying to keep up appearances, she is so hyperaware it hurts. Again and again, the author explores the dichotomy between life as it happens and the rehearsed anecdote, the preferred outcome. In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, even suburban quiet has "nothing to do with peace." Bank's much-anticipated debut merits all its buzz and, more to the point, transcends it. --Kerry Fried
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