Girls In White Dresses

The backstory: When Girls in White Dresses started showing up on several Best of 2012 lists, I was surprised. I had dismissed it as chick lit based on the cover. As Rachel Fershleiser (are you following her tumblr? You should) said best, Girls in White Dresses is a great women-processing-their-shit book.

The basics: Girls in White Dresses is the story of three young women and close friends: Isabella, Mary and Lauren. Together and separately, they navigate the years following college, while some friends are getting married and having babies, while others are losing jobs or single or lacking direction.

My thoughts: From the moment I started reading this novel, I was in love with both Close's writing and these beautifully developed show more characters:
"New York in September was busy, like everyone was in a hurry to get back to real life after the lazy summer. Isabella liked the feeling of it, the rushing around, and she let herself get swept along the sidewalks. She walked quickly, trotting beside the crowds of people, like she had somewhere important to be, too, like she was part of the productivity of the city, when really she was just going to Bed Bath & Beyond to get a shower curtain." (page 6)
Close immediately took me back to my early twenties. She captures the joys, fears and hope of those years perfectly. There are quiet moments and loud moments. The duality of being happy for your friends and yet scared or sad for yourself is beautifully rendered here:
"Kristi’s third shower was thrown by her fiance’s groomsmen. It was a couples’ shower to stock the bar, and everyone was supposed to bring a bottle of liquor and glasses. “What kind of groomsmen throw a shower?” Lauren asked. “Are they gay? I’ve never heard of such a thing. And you know what? I’m not going. I’m not in a couple, and I need the liquor more than she does.” Lauren ended up going to the party and drinking almost the whole bottle of liquor she’d brought. “I need it more,” she kept saying."
Ultimately, what makes this book amazing are the flaws of the characters. In this way, Girls in White Dresses reminded me of These Days Are Ours (my favorite read of 2012.) Both feature young women fresh from college navigating the world of adulthood, but more importantly, both feature flawed young women I can relate to. They have problems and insecurities, yet Haimoff and Close write them with a rawness and honesty that is brave and refreshing.

Favorite passage: "She could feel herself getting sentimental, which she always was. Sometimes she missed people before they even left her, got depressed about a vacation being over before it started."

The verdict: Girls in White Dresses was one of my favorite reads of 2012 and one of the most surprising, largely because the cover, while charming, misrepresents the novel. This novel is a moving tale of young adulthood, the beautiful complexities of friendships, and the uncertainties of forging your own path in life, love, work and time. Thinking Girls in White Dresses is about weddings was as foolish as thinking Sex and the City is a show only about sex. Both find their groove by combining realistic and easy-to-relate-to tales of friendship with humor and without shying away from the parts of ourselves we'd rather hide or forget. Jennifer Close made a fan out of me, and I'm now eagerly awaiting the release of her second novel, The Smart One, in April. show less

A little bit in the same style as [b:A Visit from the Goon Squad|7331435|A Visit from the Goon Squad|Jennifer Egan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1290480318s/7331435.jpg|8975330], which I loved -- you get these episodic vignettes, each based on one of a squad of more-or-less connected characters. In this case they're all female, and the threads that connect the stories together are the female friendships: old roommates, college friends, bridesmaids. Most of the individual vignettes themselves, though, focus on a particular male-female relationship, which means this book isn't quite as girly as you might think. There was a good mix of "Wow, I've been there and know exactly what that's like," and "Ha, I'm really glad that's never show more happened to me!" But there was also a smattering of that characteristic of good literature, I think, which is a description of something unusual that seems both very realistic and somewhat profound. show less

Here's a perfect winter snuggle-into-the-blankets chick lit saga, featuring a bunch of post-college girlfriends who flounder around in NYC, dating losers and working crappy jobs until the marriages, kids, and suburban exiles begin. The stories of the five or six, plus their sisters and various Bridezilla friends, are all amusing examples of white privilege (parents' support is always lurking in the background), and for me, a guilty pleasure. There are real dilemmas here, but none that money or marriage can't seem to cure. The writing is crisp and focused.

Vignettes centering on a group of friends, the telling of which tie into a novel. Amusing, insightful, and occasionally annoying, (but only because it's so far removed from my world and experience.) I needed a diversionary read from a somewhat pedantic nonfiction book I am reading for review. The title is a definite ear worm, though.

Well they say you shouldn't wear white after Labour Day. But reading Jennifer Close's debut novel Girls in White Dresses is right at anytime - either before or after Labour Day.

Girls in White Dresses follows Mary, Lauren and Isabella as they graduate from college, start their careers and follows their friendships, relationships, marriages etc. on into their early thirties.

I wasn't too sure about the format at first - it's told in a series of stories within the story - vignettes almost. But I quickly found this style addicting. It suited the snapshot moments of each life that are presented - fears, hopes, dreams, disappointments and more. But the thread linking them all is weddings.

Close has a fun, fresh, quirky voice that had me show more laughing out loud and nodding oh yeah many times. (Kristi the bridezilla was probably the funniest moment for me) Girls in White Dresses would appeal to many age groups - those of us who have lived through the ninety million bridal and baby showers and emerged unscathed on the other side, those who like a good chick lit read, and those currently passing through this stage of life. Close has written a fun book that celebrates friendships - one you'll want to share with your BFF. show less

A nice decade to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there

Reading the jacket copy for Girls in White Dresses, I was expecting a fairly conventional chick lit novel—which is something I enjoy every now and again. However, as I delved into this novel of connected stories (a format I always seem to enjoy), I was delighted to discover something more substantive than I was expecting. Jennifer Close’s debut is so much more than 20-something women moving through a succession of weddings.

Girls in White Dresses is a coming-of-age novel, not of a single girl, but of an entire group of interconnected young women. They know each other from schools or jobs or through the friends of friends. The stories chart a progression of large and small show more events as these women move from their early 20s to the end of that pivotal decade. It’s about the growing you do as you enter adulthood, and the mistakes and detours you make along the way. I can honestly say that my life in my 20s bore almost no resemblance to the lives depicted on the pages of this book. Even so, there was a universality to that period of life that I absolutely recognized, and could enjoy looking back upon from the greater confidence and security of my 40s.

I’ve read reviews that suggested that this novel would be most enjoyed by the same 20-something women being written about, but I’m not sure that’s the case. There’s something really delightful about being able to revisit a period of your life, without it BEING your life. I can smile about the foibles of my 20s now. Not so much while I was living them. And so I smiled my way through Girls in White Dresses. There was plenty of humor along the way to give me cause to smile, and plenty of nostalgia. Written as a series of short stories, the characters populating Close’s novel were more like snapshots of women, showing them as they existed in episodic moments of time. But these women were idiosyncratic, believable, and occasionally quirky. (I love that Ellen dates ugly boys!) I will warn that there is a large cast of characters, and it takes a while to get a solid grasp of who is who, and where they are from story to story. Close’s prose seemed sort of choppy and spare as the novel opened, but either I got used to her style or things smoothed out as I got further into the novel.

I don’t know that you’ll find larger truths or messages in this book, but for whiling away a few hours, you could do far worse. I would love to follow these young women into their thirties and beyond. show less

This book has no plot, the characters are indistinguishable from one another, and I found it pretty boring most of the way through.

But then I got to the end and realized I kind of liked it. It is a book about growing up. About how your life completely changes from the time you are 22 and just out of college to when you are 30 and all your friends are married with kids and how you never really noticed yourself changing, it just happens.