Whores on the Hill: A Novel

Very juvenile and kind of depressing. But I liked it. Curran's writing style is breathless and evocative and I probably would have tried to imitate her style had I discovered her during my creative writing college days.
The story is about three teenage girls and they're wild high school lives....everything you think will happen, happens. But Curran's writing style makes it worthwhile, I think.

A wildly uneven but engrossing story of bad girls in the late 1980's. Enough parallels with my own tarnished high school career that I stuck it out. Curran has a lot of promise, I think. Her writing is very vivid, very intense, but she tends to telegraph the upcoming plot twists a little too clearly.

I'm still not exactly sure how I feel about this book. Part of me loved it and part of me was disturbed by it. My conclusion is that this was about a girl looking for a place to belong and how hard she tried to fit in to the only people who tried to befriend her.

The story wasn't too bad but the writing itself was horrible. It read like an undergrad's first attempt at creative writing. I'm not nitpicky about grammar or syntax or anything like that but certain phrases were so wrong that they just pulled me right out of the story. One example: leggy calves. What? Or the overuse of the verb "palmed." Little things but they were enough to distract me.

A passable, very easy read. I felt like the ending was rushed & not very believable though. I also was disappointed in the fact that there really was no resolution.
Furthermore, this is most definitely an adult book. The girls in the book are 15 & 16, but I believe it's a book for 18+. I read a review at Barnes & Noble & a 16 year old was talking about how she wants to be just like these girls. These girls are not role models--more like cautionary figures & I was surprised that young women would look up to them.

This book is a series of episodes in a small group of teenage girl's lives. They meet at their private catholic all-girls school and become friends. They fight and make up, they deal with boys and dating, and they develop a reputation as "Whores" which they learn to embrace. Ultimately, the story is a tragedy, as their lives are forever changed. It is a story about friendship and fitting in and coming of age in the 1980s.

Good in an episodic way, until "something happens" at the end which was out of character with the tone and pace of the book and took what could have been a decent novel to a passable one. The author tried too hard.