Word: tomboys
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...mind seems almost as wiry as her body. "There isn't a crossword puzzle I can't finish in half an hour," Babe admits modestly. She likes to play gin rummy but is too good at it to get many opponents. The once lonely, homely tomboy is now a social success; she is an extremely graceful ballroom dancer and the life of almost any party, doing imitations of herself as a child singing I Get the Blues When It Rains, or hauling out a harmonica and rocking into a hillbilly air. Babe once banked $3,500 for taking...
...That Stuff." This is the gruesome world of Tomboy, a novel with the stiff and one-dimensional authenticity of a social worker's report. Every incident in the book, says Author Ellson, is true, based on material he collected while working as a "recreational therapist" with young delinquents in New York City...
...center of Ellson's novel stands Tomboy, the leader of the girl Harps. On the surface she is hard and violent, able to beat up many of the boys in the gang, slick at robbery and negotiating with fences. Actually, she is a confused and wounded child. She hates her home because her father drinks and her stepmother scolds. She resents being a girl, she mistreats the other girls when they attract the boys, she scorns love movies because "that stuff gets me sick all the time...
...Tomboy's one friend is Mick, the most timid boy in the gang. When he is killed in a robbery, Tomboy is left alone in a world of fear and violence. At the novel's end, she is hopping a freight car to get away from the police...
Miniature Mobsters. Despite its fascinating subject, Tomboy is no great shakes as a novel. Its surface action is credible enough, but when Therapist-Novelist Ellson tries to explain what makes his little hoodlums run, he is much too pat and predictable. Unlike such other slum novelists as James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), he lacks the gift for individualizing his miniature mobsters and thereby arousing sympathy for them. The chances are that Ellson, who is a better reporter than novelist, would have done just as well to turn his notes into...