Revolution of Little Girls - Hardcover

Boyd, Mc Cray Blan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022403197X ISBN 13: 9780224031974

Publisher: Cape, Jonathan, 1992

Synopsis

The Revolution of Little Girls pierces the heart of the American South and the Sixties - not to mention childhood, romance, sex and self-destruction - with wit and sympathy and insights that vibrate with originality. Ellen had a different course plotted for herself from the start. Playing at Tarzan and Jane as a child in Charleston, she always wanted to be Tarzan; her drink of choice at thirteen was Coke with ammonia spirits; and her attempt to travel the beaten path with her Harvard husband ends with a series of 'lesbian revolutionary' experiences, which in turn lead to spiritual wanderings among shamans and gurus. Ultimately she tips into an odd form of madness; she is bedeviled by imaginary little girls, fragments of her uncongealed childhood past. Just how they eventually leave her, and how she makes peace with her mother and herself, is the conclusion of this brutally honest, disturbing, and illuminating novel.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

w hard she tries, Ellen Burns will never be Scarlett O'Hara. As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution Of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

"Funny...lively and wry, insightful and poignant. [A] psychedelic and unsettling journey into a Southern heart of darkness."-- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Funny and touching...Ellen's voice is immensely likable, start to finish-deadpan funny, smart, and on to herself." -- Boston Globe

"Blanche Boyd is irreplaceable. There is no cast of mind with quite the same savor, no humor quite so droll, no insights which reverberate in quite the same pitch. Her style [is] sure, true, and vastly pleasurable." -- Robert Stone

About this edition

• Publisher: Cape, Jonathan
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 022403197X
• ISBN 13: 9780224031974
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1