Anthropology of an American Girl

Anthropology of an American Girl is another novel which I downloaded on Kindle without checking out the length -- 608 pages, now I know-- but still worth the time I invested. This novel was first self-published several years ago and then picked up and reissued this spring. Hamann's central character is Evie, a brilliant and introspective teeenage girl, whom the novel traces for nearly a decade, ending shortly after her graduation from college. This isn't a typical coming-of- age book , but a slow and deliberate journey through the mind of an adolescent girl who at times appears both self-absorbed and metaphor possessed. About to begin my 25th year of teaching high school girls, I have found much of Evie to be vividly accurate, so powerfully drawn, not just in description but in the actual way that I have seen girls debate their social position and muse about the ways of the adult world, just beyond their grasp. Plot here relies heavily on the two central male relationships Evie has, one to a troubled boy, Jack,who is a gifted and reclusive musician. Harrison, the older man whom Evie is spellbound by, becomes the focus of her growth, albeit pain riddled. Parents are either absent or slightly deranged or both in this novel; these young people make choices about drugs and sex and independence in a vacuum. The time this novel occurs, the late 1970s, is also evocative in the way rebellion and independence are fused and explored. Evie's struggle for love is painful if maybe a bit over the top. Evie's chronicles are well drawn, and Hamann has a debut novel that is impressive. Evie is not a female Holden Caufield, and that is OK with me.