Word: girls
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Youth. A mountain man, 22 years old, fresh-faced and heartbreakingly handsome in his fringed buckskins, says goodbye to the girl he shyly loves. He speaks awkwardly, in tones still untutored by the professionalism that was to come, of the wild land that he must abandon her for, to explore along The Big Trail...
...startled his former neighbors with another new nugget of family information. Said he: "My prayer is for so many people who have died, beginning with my parents, my brother and my sister, whom I never knew because she died before I was born." Papal aides later explained that the girl, born three years before the Pope, lived only one day. His mother Emilia died years after that while giving birth to a second daughter, who was stillborn...
...then Abeba's "New York Mamma" comes to get her. Backwater Carolina fades into Brooklyn blur, the shabby streets a "tangle of evening voices" and of men who act tough, talk fast, sing scat. Here Abeba, nicknamed the "Piano Girl" for the black and shiny spinet that her ambitious mother buys her, grows up to the accompaniment of Mozart and Mendelssohn. "We looking for you to make it big," her street-corner admirers tell...
Mary Ann, a bright, prickly girl, is the author's most important observer, and it might be expected that events would arrange themselves so that she could see, if not wholly comprehend, what happens to the other characters. She does see a good deal, but unfortunately she misses more. 'No one, for instance, knows that Dan and the cheerfully manless Anna were lovers 15 years...
...night, when all the characters disperse, Lurie has made a strong and subtle point. The book's '30s setting is a clue: Why not 1879? Because the author's intention is to show the narrow range of adult female behavior that was on view to a girl of four decades ago. Men were defined in terms of their jobs and women in terms of their men-or lack of them. Celia was an adman's wife; insecurity was her way of life. Honey had nothing to do except tease. Anna, the strongest adult around, was considered...