Girl, by award-winning French novelist Camille Laurens (Little Dancer Aged Fourteen), offers a lyrical and perceptive portrait of a woman growing up in a society that undervalues and overlooks girls. From the moment Laurence Barraqué was born in 1959, her life has been defined by the first words she hears: "It's a girl." Her parents, who wanted a son but ended up with two daughters, raise her under a shadow of disappointment, while Laurence puzzles through girlhood and puberty, attempting to understand her sexuality, her worth and herself in relation to men. But when she becomes a mother to a daughter in the 1990s, Laurence wants to raise her to think differently about what it means to be a girl--if she can only figure out how to do that.
Girl, quiet and meditative, focuses its unwavering attention on Laurence's internal life. Despite the deeply personal core of the text, translated by Adriana Hunter, Laurens manages to remove too much sentimentality, keeping her exploration of a female experience in a sexist society as clear-eyed as possible. Nevertheless, Laurens's language, as subtle as it is poignant, takes center stage in the novel, sweeping readers along 40 years of Laurence's life as if on a wave. And though Laurence's experiences are meant, in some ways, to be representative of those of a generation of middle-class white women, the intimacy of her first-person narration and the thoughtful details with which Laurens crafts her life allows readers to understand that the "girl" represents much more than one word can convey. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor