The Girls
By John Bowen
4/5
()
About this ebook
In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as “the girls”—a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specializing in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.
So it’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue’s absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night.
If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue’s return to the nest, what’s that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss?
Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.
John Bowen
John T. Bowen, Jr. has spent the past twenty years researching the airline industry. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Central Washington University, the author of The Economic Geography of Air Transportation: Space, Time, and the Freedom of the Sky (Routledge, 2010), and numerous aviation articles published in Journal of Air Transport Management, Journal of Transport Geography, and Journal of Economic Geography. Previous to joining academia, he worked for Singapore Airlines.
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Reviews for The Girls
7 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A little gem. This dark comedy of manners and mores from 1988 scores for me on three important points: first, it is beautifully written. NOT flowery and poetic, heaven help us, no, but wonderful plain-spoken descriptions and observations that, in the tradition of the best writing, mean that the thing described or observed can never be seen in quite the same way again. Bowen's descriptions, and catalogues, of the content of an English country garden are so beautiful it made me want to get straight to a garden center. His description of a rather old, poorly constructed and over-taxed septic tank at the bottom of that idyllic garden was so detailed and rigorous that I shudder to think about the research he must have done. And as a former teacher of creative writing, I marvelled at the clever and apt use of the omniscient voice, and the story structure that lulls the readers into a sense of complacency, like dozing in a deck chair in that lovely garden on a warm summer's afternoon, only to shock you out of that complacency like being slapped by a cold, dead hand.
Because second, it is dark. Dark, dark, dark. And hilarious. I am doing my best to avoid spoilers here, but trust me, when I say that when the action starts, it is not for the faint-hearted. This is "Mapp and Lucia", directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in his "Psycho" years.
And yet ... third, it is incredibly touching and even life-affirming. "The Heart wants what it wants ..." but with all due respect to Emily Dickinson, John Bowen's little gem of a novel demonstrates that it cares very much indeed.1 person found this helpful