Green Girl: A Novel
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
With the fierce emotional and intellectual power of such classics as Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Kate Zambreno's novel Green Girl is a provocative, sharply etched portrait of a young woman navigating the spectrum between anomie and epiphany.
First published in 2011 in a small press edition, Green Girl was named one of the best books of the year by critics including Dennis Cooper and Roxane Gay. In Bookforum, James Greer called it "ambitious in a way few works of fiction are." This summer it is being republished in an all-new Harper Perennial trade paperback, significantly revised by the author, and including an extensive P.S. section including never before published outtakes, an interview with the author, and a new essay by Zambreno.
Zambreno's heroine, Ruth, is a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes, by day spritzing perfume at the department store she calls Horrids, by night trying desperately to navigate a world colored by the unwanted gaze of others and the uncertainty of her own self-regard. Ruth, the green girl, joins the canon of young people existing in that important, frightening, and exhilarating period of drift and anxiety between youth and adulthood, and her story is told through the eyes of one of the most surprising and unforgettable narrators in recent fiction—a voice at once distanced and maternal, indulgent yet blackly funny. And the result is a piercing yet humane meditation on alienation, consumerism, the city, self-awareness, and desire, by a novelist who has been compared with Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Editor's Note
Realistic portrayal...
Zambreno’s novel diverges from melodramatic & comedic stories about messy young women’s lives, instead offering a disturbingly recognizable depiction of the quiet ways the 20’s identity crisis manifests.
Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is also the author of two novels and three books of nonfiction. She lives in New York and teaches writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.
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Reviews for Green Girl
75 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Couldn't make life scenarios and mind scripts of current generation of under 30 more accurate.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Couldn't make life scenarios and mind scripts of current generation of under 30 more accurate. Green Girl, emerged through life long assimilation of media and advertising imagery. Green Girl follows an illusory lifestyle and chase after dreams which don't exist. Green Girl exist, like a particle in quantum theory, thanks to being seen and observed. However, Green Girl never gets there.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5At 22 I might have loved this book. At 40 I kind of wanted her to get over herself already.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Green Girl by Kate Zambreno was a chore for me to read. Oh, the writing is good, the imagery vivid, the capturing of a character spot-on - it's just that I disliked Ruth, green girls, and the whole idea of rampant consumerism, alienation as a way of life, and the whole angsty/ennui surfeit of this young woman and her self-destructive wonts. I think the problem is that I am so diametrically opposite that I certainly can't relate to her now, and couldn't when I was her age. Sorry but this is a did not finish for me. Reviews make it clear that many people appreciated Green Girl much more than I after the first third of the novel.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Started it and could not put it down. Took the long way home on the train. Stayed up too late last night. Stunning.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book though it is hard to put into words. We meet Ruth, a young, lost girl, American living in London, working for Harrods and loathing it. Ruth is a blank slate, the reader follows her on her journey that seems to have no destination.The writing was amazing, I actually started reading this after I was disgusted by the poor writing of a novel that had been showered with praise. This novel was like a palate cleanser for my brain. I loved it so much, I decided I needed a paperback copy. I have a feeling that this is a book I will re-read at least once a year.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Loved it. Vividly captures the ennui of young women. We as young women aren't allowed to define ourselves, and even when we eventually decide we no longer buy the performance we've been taught we must undertake as women, we still can't win.