Word: marian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Marian knows that the other girls look down on her. She feels embarrassed because her mother is divorced, and she lives on Third Avenue. She never invites her classmates home for lunch because she knows that they would disapprove of her household and of her mother’s roommate, the unfashionable and sarcastic Boothy...
...protagonist, Marian Gilbert, is thirteen at the outset of the book. She is lonely, but only half-aware of that fact. She attends a small girls’ prep school on the Upper East Side, and feels lost in a “fog,” since she doesn’t fit in there. The other eighth graders are wealthier, with society parents and homes on Park Avenue, and they know how to play “prison ball” in gym class...
...first chapter, Marian is faced with an exciting prospect—the possibility of friendship with another outcast of the Norton School, Val Boyd. Val’s parents flit about the world while leaving Val with a caretaker in the Village, and so she, like Marian, feels fatherless. Val is also ostracized at Norton, because she leaves school early each day and all the other girls know that she visits a psychoanalyst in the afternoons. To them, she seems neurotic and strange...
...Marian quickly form an intense friendship. At first they simply play games and spend Saturdays with one another. But soon they both become fixated on a single task: the secret worship of a gifted but lazy pianist named Henry Orient...
...first loves Henry because she too wants to be a concert pianist, and she sees some of her own troubles reflected in his wild persona (and according to her shrink, she is also acting out some form of Oedipal complex). Marian follows, and begins to obsess over him too, even though she doesn’t really feel the same attraction. Val and Marian clip articles about him from the society papers and stalk his concerts at Carnegie Hall...