[.ca] Girl Talk (ISBN 0743400836)

baggott's poetry is better:
I'm afraid this novel didn't work for me. The characters were flat and it felt cliche. The biggest annoyance, however, was the way Baggott recycled her images from her poetry. While I was reading Girl Talk, I was also reading her book of poems This County of Mothers. While the images in the poems were fresh and surprising, when I discovered them nearly word for word in her novel I felt cheated; that was a cheap shot.

Never believe a truth until someone insists.....:
....Or, something like that. Anyway, advice such as that is near the end of the book. I really liked this author's fresh, different perspective on life and her way of showing us how Lissy blossomed into her own being. Told in a candid, matter-of-fact style, this author hands you fiction that is in so many ways non- but, the real deal for all of us. I feel the book definitely gets much better at the last few pages and am relieved to watch everything finally merge. Life is soooo not perfect, and Lissy shows us this from the get-go. Oddly enough, she paves an eloquence for what she's learned and been told. I never like giving details about a book via a review, so forgive me if this sounds like I'm jumping around. I was satisfied with the book on many levels, and, having never read her before, will most likely pick her work up again. Unique style here of the typical coming-of-age saga. Don't pass it up.

I liked it:
This book was rather surreal. It's about "the summer that never was" for 29-year-old unmarried, pregnant Lissy Jablonski. Told in flashbacks from her current adult self in 1999, Lissy recounts the summer of 1985, when she was 15 and her father ran away with his 24-year-old assistant. Lissy lets us know in the beginning that her dad will come back to her mom, but the events of hat summer and what she discovers about her family and lineage, about grandparents she never met and grandparents she didn't know she had, about asthmatic dogs named Jacko, her mother's snooty college roommate and her weird kids -- one who is her best friend in adulthood and inexplicably marries her stripper roommate, Kitty Hawk, within a week of meeting her. It is a muddled tale at times, but it is full of all the funny moments that bring us to the people who make up our whole lives. It could have been anyone's story, perhaps even someone you know, if they took the time to recount it to you. That's ehat made it veryinteresting to me, and enjoyable to boot.

Exactly!!!:
I loved the novel Girl Talk. It was about a woman and how she and her mother had talks about her mothers life during the summer that they labeled 'the summer that never happened'. Basically, the woman decided that she had lived her life trying to be her mother. I really identified with this book because my mother and i have the exact kind of relationship. It was absolutely fantastic.

Dull MFA'd tripe:
If Baggott has an original voice, it certainly isn't shown in this novel. A paint-by-numbers narration and terribly dull, no one will read this in the coming years. Her poetry is a joke & frankly she's not only a bad writer, she's not a person worth remembering or talking about. Now, why am I surprised this garbage gets published?