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Thursday, February 5, 2009
title: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
author: Melissa Bank
published: 1999
genre: fiction/chic lit
pages: 274
rated: 3 out of 5
A friend of mine passed her copy of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing to me. Funny enough, as I was in the middle of reading this book, I saw a preview for a movie that was going to be playing on the tv, and I made sure to watch it. The film is called 'Suburban Girl', and it is loosely based on this book. Funny coincidence! I had no idea. When I was watching the movie, I realized, it was based on the book I was reading.
In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing , Jane Rosenal narrates the stories. In the first story, she is 14 years old, then in the next story she's in her twenties, then the next story jumps back to when she was younger, only for the next one to go far into the future when she has a grown son. Confused? I was a tad bit myself.
I had no idea what this book was about when I first started reading it, and it ended up being a short story collection about Janes life, mostly her dating life. The book is told almost like a memoir/diary. Jane grows up to become an editorial assitant, and she reads and edits unsolicited manuscripts. The stories are mostly about her family life and love life, her relationship with a man 28 years her senior. I did not like the first two stories, but I did enjoy the others, mostly the last one.
The short stories are called:
Advanced Beginners
The Floating House
My Old Man
The Best Possible Light
The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine
You Could be Alone
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
What I did not like:
* The time lapses in the story were confusing. She goes from being 14, to being in her 20's, then back to age 14, then fast forward into adulthood again only to end up in the far future. I was confused.
* I wish I would have known it was a book of short stories. The cover doesn't say so.
*Jane is in all of the stories. I like short stories that have nothing to do with one another. If this book were just written as one story, and gone in order, I probably would have liked it more.
* Sometimes the writing was choppy, there was just not enough description and some of it didn't make any sense to me. I know as readers we use our imaginations as we read, but this didn't work for me. Some of the passages are written like journal entries. I don't mind books that are written like that, like Bridget Jones Diary, for example, but in this book I didn't like it.
What I did like:
* Nearly all the stories had some shocking event take place. I liked that, it grabbed my attention when I least expected it to.
* A few parts made me laugh. There are some funny moments.
* The romances in Jane's life seemed realistic. In the end you want her to find someone she can be happy with.
* Some of the passages were written beautifully, like this:
Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.
I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window.
Nobody was watching, except me.
For me, this book had it's good and it's bad parts. And I was interested enough to read it all the way through. I am glad I stuck to it and finished it, it got better towards the end. So don't let my review dissuade you from reading this one. What I didn't like about this book, another reader might love. And this is the kind of book that has me torn. You know what I mean? I both liked and disliked this book.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
has been made into a movie called 'Suburban Girl' starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin. It was a cute movie.
