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A Girl becomes a comma like that.
Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instruction who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to each her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next—sometimes comically, sometimes catastrophically—as if her own survival depended upon it. Ella Bloom, an adult student in Rachel’s poetry class, has aspirations beyond her work at a local family planning clinic. But she spends her nights wondering why her husband kissed one of her colleagues and whether it will lead to a full-fledged affair. She is also preoccupied with one of her repeat patients, Georgia, a teenager whose frequent clinic visits speak volumes. What they all have in common is their desire for love, despite its many obstacles.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780743257756
- ISBN: 0743257758
- Physical Description: p. ; cm.
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Terrace Public Library.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terrace Public Library | Gla (Text) | 001794296 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2004 April #2
Women apparently looking for love turn out to want much more-or something.Newcomer Glatt makes a valiant try to parse the reasons for her characters' behaving foolishly, but she doesn't come up with much more than the usual mental anguish of troubled love and misdirected lives. Although the tale portrays a few different women, the bulk of its energy goes to Rachel Spark, a 30-year-old college instructor and poet recently moved back in with her mother, who's being treated for breast cancer. Rachel has a thing for taking random new lovers back to the apartment in order to placate the growing despair she feels over her mother's condition. The root of her problem apparently stems from the "first wrong boy" she slept with at age 13, after which "something inside me hardened . . . a girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Other players include Ella, who works at the clinic where Rachel goes for an abortion after a one-night stand and who's worried about losing her boyfriend to a co-worker; Georgia, a teenager who's a chronic clinic visitor, smart in most ways but quite stupid when it comes to boys; and Angela, a mousy friend of Rachel's who seems as bored with her as the author does. Taken by themselves, most of these women's lives could be the material of good short fiction. Georgia, in particular, is fiery and purposeful, with an unapologetic edge and a grudge against pretty much everybody, but it's not clear what purpose she serves here. Glatt's interweaving of people and plots can sometimes hit a mark, mostly in allowing us to see her people from the inside and out, and she has a good feel for how one's insecurities translate into risky behavior. But the whole thing skids off the road long before coming to any sort of conclusion.Heartfelt but poorly built.Agent: Andrew Blauner Copyright Kirkus 2004 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2004 June #2
Poetry and pap smears. Chlamydia and cancer. Panic and promiscuity. Glatt's first novel explores women's physical and mental health through the shifting lives of her characters. Rachel Stark is a poet and lecturer at a Southern California university. Rachel's mother has had her first recurrence of breast cancer when the story opens in 1999. Her mother is hopeful: "I'm not going to waste [time] on worry," she says. Rachel nods: "She'd leave that to me. I did it well. I was an expert." Rachel sleeps with men she doesn't necessarily like to keep her fears at bay. "A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Rachel's student Ella Bloom is a counselor at a women's clinic. Thirteen-year-old Georgia Carter comes to the clinic with chronic herpes, despite Ella's lectures on condoms and abstinence. Of all these women, Rachel is the least sympathetic. She is bright and talented but makes the wrong choices, choices that come more from self-absorption than emotional fragility. She's a whiner, at least for most of the novel; it is Ella's story that is the most affecting. Still, Glatt writes well; recommended for public libraries.-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2004 April #1
"A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy," muses the narrator of Glatt's keenly observed debut. "She becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing." Rachel Spark, a 30-ish university poetry teacher, is looking for the real thing-but she's also living in L.A with her mother, "because she was sick and because I was poor.... It was love, yes, but need was part of it too." As her mother slowly succumbs to breast cancer, Rachel seeks solace-and escape-in the arms of various unsuitable men. Glatt's tone shifts through comic, pensive and mournful as she also explores the lives of Rachel's newlywed student, Ella Bloom; her lovelorn, allergy-challenged best friend, Angela Burrows; and Georgia Carter, a promiscuous 16-year-old patient at the health clinic where Ella works and where Rachel later seeks an abortion. Repeated references to breasts, limbs and organs in discomfort and disease foreground these women's uneasy relationships with their bodies and their lives; drunken and sorrowful sex abounds; connections with men are made and then broken. Rachel loves her mother, but disapproves of her shedding her wig, ordering a vibrator and falling in love in the face of death. As the dying woman-Glatt's liveliest character-evicts Rachel from her hospital room, readers may sympathize: much earlier, mother has diagnosed daughter, "You're thirty. Of course you need connection." Glatt's clear-eyed rendering of the complexities of relationships between friends and family enriches a story in which the steps toward healing are small and tentative, but moving nevertheless. Agent, Andrew Blauner. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
