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lelia_t's review against another edition
4.0
This book is beautifully written (“Everywhere was breathless, heavy syringa bushes increasing the look of hush.”) and filled with surprising details that enrich rather than distract. It explores nostalgia and is written in such a way that meaning is layered, the way time is. You have to go backwards in time to understand the present: To understand why Dinah loves her neighbor Frank’s house, you have to have experienced the house she lived in with her mother. Dinah reaches out to her long-lost childhood friends because she wants to find the people who share that story with her. But we learn you can’t lock a portion of the past away and expect it to remain untouched. And others, while they might have been there with you, don’t have the same experience or feelings about the experience. It’s like when you go to a school reunion and everyone there has the same nostalgia and walks back into this pocket of time. But no one can stay there - life has pulled each of you in new directions and, what’s more, there are new students who’ve filled your place, just as in The Little Girls there are three new little girls who want to swing on the crooked swing. Dicey and Mumbo and Shiekie can’t fill that role anymore.
Bowen also seems to be looking at the way we carry our parents’ burdens - their expectations of us, their unfulfilled longing, their way of cauterizing feelings or escaping them. How the past holds us and molds us and yet time keeps marching on.
There’s a wonderful frankness about the children (Dicey likes “anything I can do, like getting on people’s nerves or swimming.”) and it’s fun to trace aspects of the girls’ childhood selves into their adulthood. There are oblique conversations that force the reader to slow down and think about what the characters are saying, what’s being suggested. Bowen’s approach and technique make this a rich and rewarding book that gets better with rereading, since sentences are laden with meaning that’s anchored in the past and foreshadows the future.
Bowen also seems to be looking at the way we carry our parents’ burdens - their expectations of us, their unfulfilled longing, their way of cauterizing feelings or escaping them. How the past holds us and molds us and yet time keeps marching on.
There’s a wonderful frankness about the children (Dicey likes “anything I can do, like getting on people’s nerves or swimming.”) and it’s fun to trace aspects of the girls’ childhood selves into their adulthood. There are oblique conversations that force the reader to slow down and think about what the characters are saying, what’s being suggested. Bowen’s approach and technique make this a rich and rewarding book that gets better with rereading, since sentences are laden with meaning that’s anchored in the past and foreshadows the future.
checkie's review against another edition
3.0
I am really struggling to get to grips with Elizabeth Bowen, or really to understand what I think of her writing. I find her prose clever and compelling but at the same time, it feels so heavily laden with meaning that I often get the sense I am missing various elements of the plot. In particular I find her dialogue particularly hard to follow and glean information from. I really want to enjoy her books, particularly as I do admire her prose, but I feel I have yet to see it combined with a really good story!
gr_ace_'s review against another edition
2.0
Just about a 3 star book! It was an enjoyable read and all the characters were interesting and likeable, however it was a little confusing, to say the least! I thought I'd got the hang of it all by the end but the last sentence threw me off again, so I'm not much more the wiser when I was at the beginning.
gh7's review against another edition
3.0
For me this novel is overloaded with mystification. Bowen is trying too hard to charge every line of dialogue, every piece of descriptive writing with psychological insight. When it works it’s brilliant but too often here it doesn’t and she seems guilty of the charge most often levelled at her – that she is more sensibility than substance. There’s far too much elaborately described minutiae in this book.
The Little Girls has a terrific premise. Three elderly women meet up again to dig up the coffer containing secret cherished objects they buried as children. The novel is divided in three parts – the middle section shows us the three women as the children they once were.
The characters, like the narrator, skirt around the many mysteries raised, few of which don’t remain hidden from us. Her experiments with dialogue are at their most stylised here. Apparently throwaway lines, often with inverted sentence structures, are wired with depth charges and explode relentlessly. Here it’s a technique that seems like a hit and miss mannerism; in the subsequent Eva Trout it acquires a masterful artistry - the ostensibly realistic and throwaway dialogue containing within its linguistic mannerisms, contortions and inversions deep psychological truths about the private soul of the speaker. It’s dialogue as oracle but expressed in simple everyday language. In The Little Girls however it felt like Bowen is forcing meaning on everything as if we’re in the midst of a poem, not a novel.
Along with her first two books, The Hotel and Friends and Relations, my least favourite Bowen novel.
The Little Girls has a terrific premise. Three elderly women meet up again to dig up the coffer containing secret cherished objects they buried as children. The novel is divided in three parts – the middle section shows us the three women as the children they once were.
The characters, like the narrator, skirt around the many mysteries raised, few of which don’t remain hidden from us. Her experiments with dialogue are at their most stylised here. Apparently throwaway lines, often with inverted sentence structures, are wired with depth charges and explode relentlessly. Here it’s a technique that seems like a hit and miss mannerism; in the subsequent Eva Trout it acquires a masterful artistry - the ostensibly realistic and throwaway dialogue containing within its linguistic mannerisms, contortions and inversions deep psychological truths about the private soul of the speaker. It’s dialogue as oracle but expressed in simple everyday language. In The Little Girls however it felt like Bowen is forcing meaning on everything as if we’re in the midst of a poem, not a novel.
Along with her first two books, The Hotel and Friends and Relations, my least favourite Bowen novel.
tr_reading's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
balancinghistorybooks's review against another edition
3.0
I have found Elizabeth Bowen's novels a little hit and miss in the past, but since absolutely adoring The House in Paris, I was eager to read more of her work. I selected The Little Girls as my next choice, and initially found it a little difficult to get into; Bowen's writing is notoriously beautiful and complex, and it always takes me a chapter or two to feel entirely comfortable with the way in which she writes.
The plot of The Little Girls, with a mystery at its heart, appealed to me, and whilst I came away without loving it, it is definitely a novel which I admire. The novel, as with many of Bowen's, is very character driven. I was not, however, pulled in enough to warrant a four or five star rating, and only found myself completely engaged with the section in which the three protagonists were 'little girls'. Bowen, for me, creates far more believable child characters than she does adults, and I was struck by every character trait and peculiarity about them. The dialogue here is often meandering, and a few retorts were utterly nonsensical; this can make the novel feel a little confusing at times. Had The Little Girls contained very little dialogue, the chances are that I would have loved it.
The plot of The Little Girls, with a mystery at its heart, appealed to me, and whilst I came away without loving it, it is definitely a novel which I admire. The novel, as with many of Bowen's, is very character driven. I was not, however, pulled in enough to warrant a four or five star rating, and only found myself completely engaged with the section in which the three protagonists were 'little girls'. Bowen, for me, creates far more believable child characters than she does adults, and I was struck by every character trait and peculiarity about them. The dialogue here is often meandering, and a few retorts were utterly nonsensical; this can make the novel feel a little confusing at times. Had The Little Girls contained very little dialogue, the chances are that I would have loved it.
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