From Booklist
Imagine being "campused." Horrors! For that meant virtual imprisonment in one's dorm room as punishment for not having both feet solidly on the floor while entertaining a male guest. So things went, along with strictly enforced curfews, panty raids, and girdles for proper young women, in 1959, especially in the South. Transplanted New Yorker Francie, a first-semester University of Florida senior, is delighted that Amanda and Liz, though more worldly than she, accept her, after which it is soon bye-bye to dateless roomie Mary Ella and hello to off-campus housing with her newfound friends and three other students--men! Sputters Mary Ella, living embodiment of feminine dreams of the time (she's bent on getting an MRS before graduation), "Consider me grateful I don't have to share this room with a loose woman next term." Survivors of the era Gerber depicts may shake their heads in recollection and cheer Francie's efforts at independence, while younger readers will appreciate the charm and fast pacing of a period piece presaging the feminist movement. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"As a woman of that period I enjoyed particularly the detailed account of dorm regulations, of surveillance, of two "feet on the floor" rules for evening guests. [Gerber] hasn't forgotten much about what it was like to move into adulthood—sexual and social—in a world so restrictive, fearful, and distrustful of natural impulses."—Janet Burstein, author of Telling the "Little Secrets": American Jewish Writers of the New Wave
"Gerber's fine attention to craft is abundantly evident, from the wonderful pacing of the narrative to her sympathetic and adroit rendering of her independent and intelligent artist-as-a-young-woman protagonist struggling through an era of American life that refuses to extol such qualities in women."—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled
Book Description
Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious "MRS" degree. Doing the unthinkable, the three move off campus to live in a house with three men-Liz's boyfriend and two handsome, mysterious Southern twins who fix foreign cars in a shop off campus. There the young women's rebellion against expectations deepens, and they begin the real-world education of pursuing their dreams. Francie yearns to be a writer, and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her "virtue," or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive "respectability"? Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.
About the Author
Merrill Joan Gerber teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology. Her many novels, short-story collections, and non-fiction works include Botticelli Blue Skies, and the prize-winning King of the World and Kingdom of Brooklyn. Her most recent books are Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions and This Is A Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories.
