American Girls

Written by Alison Umminger

Narrated by Jennifer Grace

She was looking for a place to land. Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood, and she's had it with her life at home. So Anna "borrows" her stepmom's credit card an runs away to Los Angeles, where her half-sister takes her in. But LA isn't quite the glamorous escape Anna had imagined. As Anna spends her days on TV and movie sets, she engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls-and although the violence in her own life isn't the kind that leaves physical scars, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present. In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the B-list in LA, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America-in short, on the B-list of life. Alison Umminger writes about girls, sex, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't, in a way not often seen in YA fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501932304

Alison Umminger

ALISON UMMINGER grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and as an undergraduate was the fourth woman to be elected president of The Harvard Lampoon. Today, she is a professor of English at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia, where she lives with her family. American Girls is her first novel.

Reviews for American Girls

[christopherswann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4.5 stars. Alison Umminger does a great job of capturing a teen girl's voice, and the narrator Anna will stick with me for some time. While the Manson girls material is dark and some moments are heartbreaking, this novel was laugh-out-loud funny in several places. It's both a fun read and a telling observation on America's obsessions with celebrity, beauty, Hollywood, crime, and sensationalism. At its best, AMERICAN GIRLS is up there with Rainbow Rowell's ELEANOR & PARK and Gary D. Schmidt's OKAY FOR NOW. Highly recommend.

[connie57103 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed the book, except for one thing. It is "the Manson girls" and their relationships with Charlie, the grizzly murders and more. I think those things add nothing to the book, but bring it down. It was not enough to take away from my enjoyment of Anna and Jeremy. Her sister, Delia is a bit of a downer for Anna.

Anna's mom divorced her dad and married Leslie. Anna saw Leslie's purse one day and used her credit card to fly from Atlanta to L.A., where her sister, Delia, lives. She just shows up at her door. To pay Leslie back and avoid more trouble, Delia gets Anna a job working for her boyfriend, Dex. Delia is making a movie with her ex-boyfriend, Roger. Dex takes Anna to his tv set where she meets Jeremy (he and his brother are the show's stars), who likes to drive Anna around L.A.

Roger also gave Anna a research assistant job to write all she can about the Manson girls for his movie. She does make enough money to pay Leslie back. She also finds out that someone is angrily stalking her sister. Anna stays with Delia at her apartment for the summer, and does some not so normal things. All in all, it is a good y.a. book to read for fun.

Thank you Alison Umminger and Goodreads First Reads for letting me win a free book to read and give my honest review.

[paperdolllady · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Straightaway, I took to fifteen-year-old, Anna's voice. She runs away and lands in LA then hopes to stay with Delia, her twenty-something sister, right after "borrowing" her step-mother's credit card to pay for the plane ticket. Though not forgiven by her real mom (her step-mom and real mom are married) it's agreed Anna can spend the summer with Delia, who is a pretty but struggling actress. Anna is kept busy, and earns money, by doing research for one of Delia's former directors, Roger. However, Anna is left to stay on a shooting set with Delia's script-writer and now-boyfriend, Dex, because Delia is off working in secret with her former lover/director, Roger. The whole situation is fraught with complications. It is Roger who pays Anna for research on the Manson cult and Manson's AMERICAN GIRLS followers -- those who'd committed horrific crimes. While on set, Anna meets and has a crush on a teen idol star, Jeremy -- he's not a stereotypical teen idol-- he's considerate, likable, and enjoys Anna's humor, smarts, and cares about their friendship.

This is a story about fame, celebrity, and what's superficial and what's of real value beneath. In my view, readers of all ages will enjoy Anna and the flawed, yet interesting, characters of this story. And how Anna wears and holds her own beauty during her summer in LA.

[seasonsoflove_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Anna, a fifteen year old fed up with her home life, steals her stepmother's credit card and buys a plane ticket to L.A., where her older sister Delia (an actress) lives. But once there, Anna realizes L.A. is no paradise, and the escape she seeks may be nowhere to be found.

To pay back her stepmother, Anna takes a research job for her sister's ex-boyfriend, a director who wants to be inspired by the Manson Family, but knows very little about them. So while gaining insight into her sister's real life, and spending time on the set of a popular television show, Anna reads everything she can about Manson and, more specifically, the Manson Girls.

The Manson plot line was what drew me to this book. As a true crime reader, I'm immediately interested in any fictional books that weave in true crime. And the parts centered around Anna's research were certainly interesting. In fact, they were the most interesting part of the book--which I think was actually a problem.

I feel like I should have been much more invested in Anna, and Delia, and their family, and their relationships. But instead, I found myself hoping when I turned the page, the focus would be on Anna's research again.

It's not that I didn't care at all about the characters, it was just that I found it difficult to like them. While we were certainly provided reasons the characters acted the way they did, they still came across, to me, as cynical and hard to connect with, and sometimes even especially cruel.

Thinking about it, though, maybe that was the point? Anna frequently highlights connections between herself and the Manson Girls, who I would certainly describe as hard to connect with and very cruel. Maybe the readers are supposed to view Anna and her fellow characters as almost-Girls, human beings who manage to find that scrap of humanity and hold fast, rather than falling pray to someone promising them the world.

I suspect I would have liked this book more if I hadn't recently read The Girls, a book I felt did a much better job at tackling a very similar subject. And while I did enjoy reading American Girls, I'm left wanting more from Anna and her fictional cohorts. I want them to achieve that growth that comes from truly learning from history's mistakes.