More than a collection of short stories, yet not quite a novel, Local Girls occupies an undefined territory between these two forms. The local girls in question are Gretel Samuelson, her best friend, Jill, her mother, Franny, and Franny's cousin Margot--four characters who weave in and out of each of the 15 related stories that chronicle the rocky years of Gretel's adolescence. That hers will be a tough row to hoe is immediately apparent in the first story, "Dear Diary," in which Alice Hoffman introduces the Samuelson family just as they are being swallowed up by the fissures that have cracked them apart. "Long before the plane touched down in Miami we could hear our parents arguing," Gretel tells us of a family vacation to Florida; "and at the hotel room they locked themselves in their room. If you ask me, working so hard at being married can backfire." It is the end of the marriage that has lasting ramifications, however, as we discover in later stories: Gretel's brilliant older brother, Jason, becomes a drug addict; their mother must battle cancer alone; and Gretel becomes involved in a destructive relationship with a drug dealer. All pretty depressing plot points, to be sure, yet Hoffman's luminous prose combined with Gretel's tart and funny perspective keeps the reader eagerly turning the pages until the very end.

In fact, Gretel and her family and friends are so compelling, so endearing, that the reader wishes Hoffman had chosen to give the Samuelsons a novel instead of this series of stories. In reading about Jason's descent from A student with an acceptance letter from Harvard to working in the produce section at the local supermarket and shooting heroin, for example, one can't help but feel that a lot of his motivations happen between stories; and Gretel's difficult relationship (or lack thereof) with her father and new stepmother functions mainly as a plot device, leaving the reader wanting so much more. And yet, if one is to judge the success of a book by the reader's reluctance to be done with it, then Local Girls is successful, for Hoffman has created a world so enticing that one is willing to overlook the minor flaws. At the end of the title story, as the now-grown Gretel and Jill discuss two teenage girls in the neighborhood who recently committed suicide, Jill remarks: "They should have just waited. That's all they had to do. They would have grown up and everything would have been all right." The same might be said of reading Local Girls.

From Publishers Weekly
Hoffman's chosen form of a novelistic group of short storiesAall of which share the same family charactersAlends itself nicely to the abridged audio format, in which the fragmentation seems a willful form of stylized narration. The audio's producers have augmented this effect: two narrators, the airy Merlington and the pragmatic Vigesaa, play off against each other in tone as they trade stories. In the opener, Gretel Samuelson tells of her family's troubles in confidential, diarylike schoolgirl terms. In later offerings, omniscient descriptions are given of mother Franny's fight against cancer and brother Jason's disintegration as a heroin addict. Though dysfunctional family fiction seems standard fare these days, Hoffman's highly individual knack for creating a sense of specific atmosphere is uncanny and unique, a quality that translates especially well in spoken form. Based on the 1999 Putnam hardcover. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-Gretel Samuelson's coming-of-age in a lower middle-class suburban area of Long Island is portrayed in brief, episodic vignettes of tumultuous tragedy and outstanding ordinariness loosely strung together. They begin when the protagonist is 12 and end as she enters college. The dysfunctional elements are the stuff of soap operas: father divorces mother for younger woman, mother dies of cancer, lively and audacious cousin makes a series of unwise romantic choices, gifted Harvard-bound brother ODs on heroin, and beautiful and brilliant best friend becomes pregnant. What raises all of this above the mediocre is the intimacy and immediacy of the narrative voice. Whether it is the cynical yet sweet first-person account by Gretel or the hopelessly romantic third-person voice of Cousin Margo, the effect is the same-palpable, recognizable angst and "smile-through-your-tears" humor. The language is wisecracking, scintillating, descriptive, and honest. Female readers will recognize and respond to the themes of relationships: those with men who all too often disappoint and those between friends and mothers and daughters that nourish and endure.Jackie Gropman, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This series of vignettes about Gretel Samuelson's teenage years is told with wisecracking humor and poignant honesty. A book that's sure to strike an empathetic chord with readers. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Ferguson
Told in alternating voices, the stories form a scrapbook of pivotal moments in the lives of Gretel and her nearest and dearest.

From AudioFile
These short stories develop the lives of Gretel Samuelson and her family and friends in a Long Island town. Divorce, friendship, addiction and growing up are the themes of Hoffman's tales, which are told in breathless nonstop words and phrases. Gretel is portrayed with a sharp, quick voice, her brother Jason with warm, throaty tones that capture his slow decline from heroin addiction. Merlington and Vigesaa alternate stories that are differentiated only by their changes in timbre and speed of narration. As always, Hoffman brings the listener her spiritual perspective for dealing with life--its tragedies, struggles and successes. M.B.K.

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author's first collection of short fiction.

Alice Hoffman is at her haunting, thought-provoking best with these interconnected stories about a Long Island family, the Samuelsons, and the lessons in survival and transformation that life brings to every family.

"Pulls the reader in effortlessly...Hoffman has the power to make you really laugh and really cry." --USA Today

"Moving and deadpan funny...Epiphanies about passion, pain, and resiliency induce smiles and shivers in equal measure." --Entertainment Weekly

About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the author of eleven other novels.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Alice Hoffman's latest is a collection of interwoven stories that create a tapestry almost as satisfying and fully realized as a novel. The literal power of bewitchment in her novel-turned-movie, Practical Magic, reappears here in sustained but isolated moments that pack something much more earthly but almost as potent: hope. The central character of most of the tales is Gretel Samuelson, a girl local to Franconia, in Long Island. Misfortune plagues her otherwise unremarkable middle-class life, beginning in the very first story, "Dear Diary," when her parents split up and she must ride to the rescue of her best friend, Jill ("the pretty one"). When high school boys grab a Halloween-costumed Jill, Gretel hits them, her heavy Gypsy bracelets knocking one of them flat. The girls flee, and for the first time in months, Gretel feels great. Her knockout punch strikes her first blow for freedom from sorrow, from disappointing men and the thoughtless havoc they wreak. Taking fate in her own hands, however briefly, restores to Gretel the belief that her life is her own and that love might still be "a state of mind ready to grace anyone willing to accept it. Anyone who cares."

The wish that love is something a fierce-hearted person can make out of thin air both buoys and sinks Gretel through the next ten years encompassed by these stories. Through her parents' divorce, her father's remarriage, the death of her beloved grandmother, her life remains guided best by those she loves without having to try: her mother, Franny; her mother's inseparable younger cousin, Margot; andJill,who remains her best friend until the morning Gretel finally leaves New York. Makeshift relationships that substitute for family are familiar Hoffman territory, and she paints these bonds between women with a light but unforgettable touch.

Gretel flirts with bitterness but never succumbs to it, mainly because those around her refuse its bleak but tempting hand. Franny not only loses her husband to a younger, crasser woman; she is also diagnosed with cancer and still lives out her days a hopeless romantic, wishing on stars no one else can see. Margot, herself an abandoned wife who desperately wants a child, plays her sidekick role to the hilt, stepping in to mother Gretel when Franny is too ill. In the moments these women of three different generations share, Hoffman hits her most satisfying, if lightly melancholic notes. After they trim Margot's Christmas tree together, snow falls: "We all rushed to the front window to look. It was the kind of snow that you hardly ever see, so heavy and beautiful you fall in love with winter, even though you know you'll have to shovel in the morning." The snow that feels sublime despite the fact that they'll have to shovel it in the morning stands in for the collection as a whole. Each flake shimmers with an individual beauty before letting go to a tormenting hardship that equally defines the mood of this book.

Gretel's world falls apart and remakes itself into something sturdier and true. That balance between bad luck and good, between knowing cynicism and blind belief, is lost on her brother, Jason, the only male in the collection who gets his own story. By the time Jason takes over the narrative in "The Boy Who Wrestled with Angels," however, he's exactly what he declared himself and Gretel to be when their new stepmother dumped them from her car in an opening story. "Face it," Jason says, "we're lost." On the verge of entering Harvard on scholarship, Jason decides to stay put. Perversely, remaining on local soil only leads him down a lost path, and soon he's dealing drugs behind the local deli counter. For Jason, the "local" in the book's title means a shrinking point of view. Soon the magic awaiting discovery within the quotidian — Hoffman's trademark style of epiphany — has been usurped in Jason by drug dependency and, ultimately, a self-deceiving nature.

A different kind of self-discovery also haunts this sure-to-charm collection, and that is the one that awaits us in death. While doppelgängers surround each main character here (for Gretel there's Jill, for Franny there's Margot), two of the characters, in facing death, see a familiar countenance staring back at them. Each experiences his or her own second self hovering nearby — a desolate angel from the life each dying character chose not to live escorts her to some other place. In another author's hands this depiction of death would surely feel forced, but in Hoffman's breezy prose, the twin of ourselves who fetches us from our failing bodies is more sensation than ghost, offering the reader that elusive kind of comfort that only fiction can provide.

In stories like "Bake at 350￯﾿ﾽ," ghosts are more literal and exhibit a bitter sense of humor. Revenge, another thread weaving together Gretel's emerging sense of self, is their trump card. When Gretel's grandmother wills her own death by eating everything the doctor recommends against, she bargains for the life of Franny. When even that accomplishment isn't enough, she returns in Gretel's tumultuous imagination to practice some beyond-the-grave voodoo. The black magic she unleashes is humorous but jagged, and it's that combination that complicates the otherwise merely entertaining qualities of Local Girls. Each story is a bite-size pleasure, and the aura established by the sum of them is enjoyable, bittersweet, and lingering.

Elizabeth Haas is a writer and critic living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Alice Hoffman evokes the world of the Samuelsons, a family torn apart by tragedy and divorce in a world of bad judgment and fierce attachments, disappointments and devotion. Hoffman charts the always unexpected progress of Gretel Samuelson from the time Gretel is a young girl already acquainted with betrayal and grief, until she finally leaves home. Gretel's sly, funny, knowing perspective is at the heart of this collection as she navigates through loyalty and loss with the help of an unforgettable trio of women: her best friend Jill, her romance-addicted cousin Margot and her mother, Franny, whose spiritual journey affects them all. Told in alternating voices, these tales work wonders. Funny and lyrical, disturbing and healing, each is a lesson of survival, a reminder of the ties of blood and the power of friendship.

FROM THE CRITICS

KLIATT

There's an old saying about life, "You have to play with the hand you're dealt." For the Samuelsons and Harringtons of small-town Franconia, New Hampshire, the deck always seems to be stacked against them. After Gretel Samuelson's father moves out and marries a younger woman, her mother Frances goes into a depression and then discovers she has cancer. Gretel, a smart, shrewd teen, becomes passionately involved with hood Sonny Garnet, the town amphetamine dealer, while her younger brother, Jason, turns from Harvard plans to drugs. Jill Harrington's mother also suffers from severe depression, and pregnant Jill quits school before her junior year, marrying Eddie LoPacca, a decent guy, though not the world's brightest. The two girls have been close "local girls" all their lives, just as Frances Samuelson and Margot Molinaro, her recently divorced cousin, have been. In fact, it is Margot who helps Frances rebuild her life by starting a catering business with her, called The Two Widows. Surprisingly, while the events in this novel are the material of classic family tragedies, the tone is rather upbeat, downright funny at times, and attitude is everything. The women—Margot and Frances, Gretel and Jill—encourage each other through the hard times of life. This sisterly bond enables them to survive "the hand they've been dealt." On the last page, when Gretel and Jill discover a firefly, Jill says, "Should I kill it?" As it flies away, Gretel says, "It decided to live." "Good for it," says Jill. "Good for us." They, too, have made that conscious decision. In our society of dysfunctional families and personal struggles, this is an important message for YAs to hear. An easy read that shouldcapture the interest of many teen readers. Reviewer: Susan G. Allison; Libn., Lewiston H.S., Lewiston, ME, September 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 5)

Library Journal

Local Girls might not be Hoffman's (Practical Magic) finest book, but it's one that lends itself brilliantly to the audio format. Billed as "stories," these are interconnected tales about the same vividly dysfunctional family. The abridgment, therefore, does not interrupt the flow, and key elements are repeated often enough that listeners can pick up any story and get the gist of the whole (though there are a few unfortunate gaps, such as how Gretel's brother actually died). The two voices, Laural Merlington and Aasne Vigesaa (one for the first person voice of Gretel, a young woman whose life is falling apart; the other for women narrating Gretel's various situations), work wonderfully, though by the second tape the supposed "working-class Long Island" accent was beginning to grate on this reviewer's ears (leaving one to think that one actress might be overplaying her role). On the plus side, that same overacting will be seen as humorous by many listeners. Recommended for most audio collections.--Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile - Miriam B. Kahn

These short stories develop the lives of Gretel Samuelson and her family and friends in a Long Island town. Divorce, friendship, addiction and growing up are the themes of Hoffman's tales, which are told in breathless nonstop words and phrases. Gretel is portrayed with a sharp, quick voice, her brother Jason with warm, throaty tones that capture his slow decline from heroin addiction. Merlington and Vigesaa alternate stories that are differentiated only by their changes in timbre and speed of narration. As always, Hoffman brings the listener her spiritual perspective for dealing with life--its tragedies, struggles and successes. M.B.K. c AudioFile, Portland, Maine

AudioFile - Ted Hipple

Laural Merlington and Aasne Vigesaa alternate voices. The local girls are teenaged Gretel; her wildish cousin, Margot; her best friend, Jill; and, most important, Gretel's mother, Franny, who is beset with a bitter divorce and cancer. Hoffman can be funny one moment and evoke tears the next, and readers Merlington and Vigesaa adapt beautifully to these excellently crafted portraits of four women. The narrators add much to the story, vocally capturing its wry qualities, its ironies, its pathos, its humor. Only three marvelously read cassettes--these tales of Long Island local girls merit listening. This is fine work by writer and readers. T.H. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Sarah Ferguson - The New York Times Book Review