Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1444089 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A six-year-old girl loses her parents in an accident and refashions her life under the tutelage of two bachelor uncles in Marshall's quirky, meandering first novel. Elray Mayhew's parents, Barkley and Jack, are electrocuted in an amusement park Tunnel of Love while celebrating Elray's sixth birthday. Her unlikely new caretakers are "Auntie" Ajax, a middle-aged transvestite who dabbles in amateur theater, and Uncle Harwood, a worldly photographer and rou‚. They don't get along with each other, but for love of Elray they move into the Mayhew's big home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At 12, Elray takes to exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the National Cathedral, where she meets a kindred spirit, 13-year-old Raoul Person. The two reenact the battle of Troy and fool around with her movie camera. When incipient sexuality pushes the two soul mates apart, other nutty, surprising characters begin to dominate Elray's youth, such as Rena Guilfoyle, the raw-boned Irish lawyer preparing them all for a big lawsuit against the amusement park, and Granny Harwood herself, the matriarch who was supposed to have died in a freak fire in Blackie's House of Beef 30 years before. Marshall's tale has all the necessary elements of a gently amusing novel, but they never really coalesce, largely because of Marshall's verbose, often bland writing. In spite of its charming premise, this coming-of-ager feels bloated.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great fun
Quick read, never lags. Quirky characters and a few plot twists. Shame on Publisher's Weekly for giving away so many plot details. I'm glad I read the book before reading their review. A little fanciful, but where's the harm in that?

Delightfully quirky first novel
Oh, man, prepare to suspend belief and just sit back and enjoy this one. I mean, when the book starts out with a little kid's parents being electrocuted in the Tunnel of Love and her being sent off to be raised by two bachelor uncles (one of whom is a transvestite), you just have to go with the flow. Things flow along, and Elray (that's the girl - don't ask about the silly name) meets Raoul, who introduces her to the concept of sexuality; then she meets Granny Harwood, long dead - but she's not. Then she meets...well, just read it.
It's all a little over the top, and one gets the sense that the author is sometimes trying too hard. But, in spite of some faults, A Girl Could Stand Up stands as a testament to the 'new' definition of Family, in all its myriad manifestations.

Promising start, disappointing follow-through
This book could have used a good editor. For my money, the book ends on page 272; unfortunately, the book is 372 pages long. There are some seeds of good story telling here, but the writer doesn't trust herself to stay with her main characters and give the reader a satisfying journey with them. Instead, she introduces new characters right up to the last page of the book, relinquishing or giving short shrift to the ones we've grown interested in. I also found myself growing exasperated with the self-conscious quirkiness of the characters. A little goes a long way with a story like this, and it's much easier to relate to characters who who don't seem to have their idiosyncracies pasted on. The book jacket draws parallels between this writer and John Irving, and it's true to some extent. But it's Irving's weaknesses she seems to share, not his strengths, ie., his tendency to dispatch characters heartlessly, to throw in ill-advised and unnecessary plot twists, to leave us with the sense that we've spent a very long time with characters we still don't fully know.

Nevertheless, I was very taken by the premise of the book -- the child who loses her parents in a freak accident and ends up being parented by two flawed uncles. If she could have stayed with that, and the boy Raoul whom she finds in her loneliness, the book would have held my attention much more.