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AMERICAN GIRLS

Alison Umminger

(UK title: MY FAVORITE MANSON GIRL)

Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood and she's had it with her life at home. With her parents recently separated and her mother's attention split between a new partner and a new baby, Anna feels pushed out of her own family. So it doesn't seem like a terrible thing to run away to Los Angeles, where Anna's sister, a wannabe actress, takes her in. All Anna wants to do is to find a place to land, but LA isn't quite the glamorous escape she had imagined. Too bad she's stuck there until she can pay back the airfare money she stole.

To make some cash, Anna engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls. Although the violence in her own life is emotional and not physical, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present. It is only in Hollywood, where wannabe stars' "work attire" is zombie or serial killer costumes, that you can't tell killers from actors.

In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the periphery of the glitz and the glam, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America. With razor-sharp prose, Alison Umminger writes about girls, sex, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't. Umminger takes us to a city where everyone spends their lives reaching for the big dream but where perhaps the real trick is just learning how to be regular.
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Published by Flatiron Books

Comments

UK: Atom Books/ Little Brown;

Setting her tale against the glittery, gritty backdrop of modern-day Los Angeles, the author deftly weaves together multiple story strands to create a razor-sharp commentary on our culture, observed with keen wit from the perspective of one honest and complex American girl. An insightful, original take on the coming-of-age story, this novel plumbs the depths of American culture to arrive at a poignant emotional truth. -- Kirkus *starred review*

Debut author Umminger's humor is biting ("My family was clearly the place where optimism went to die"), yet it reveals richly complicated relationships among mothers, daughters, and sisters. Umminger crafts a Los Angeles both glittering and soulless, leading to Anna's realization that she may have more in common with the Manson girls than she thought, but it's the choices she makes that set her apart. Publisher's Weekly, *starred review*

.. this is not a sensationalized look at a family of serial killers, but a mirror held up to a certain type of violence that effects women in America every day. Bittersweet and true, Anna's journey to self-discovery is one that should be widely read. -- Booklist , starred review

This is a brilliant novel which cannot really be categorised into one genre. It has elements of a thriller and romance but it is also wittily and cynically written, accurately portraying the thoughts and feelings of a 15-year-old girl All the characters in this novel are really well developed. The Guardian (UK)