From Publishers Weekly
In Ayres's debut novel, gorgeous Elizabeth Breedlove, a first-year student in the class of 1978 at Willard College for Women, is a tough girl with a soft center. Upperclasswoman Pip Collier, fresh from an affair with her African-American feminist professor and hot and heavy with her androgynous roommate, Dusie Hertz who is Elizabeth's official "Big Sister" becomes fascinated by Elizabeth, much to Dusie's dismay. Elizabeth, a reformed "man-eater," responds in kind, and their love begins with a "bodice-ripping ban-the-book kind of lesbian lust." Painting a picture of the women's college as a breeding ground for lesbian sex and failing to chronicle the emotional challenges Elizabeth might experience in her journey toward self-discovery, the author becomes sidetracked by stereotypes and clich‚s: there's the predatory professor, the Marine who rapes a lesbian to teach her a lesson, the lesbian who becomes a model to shack up with other lesbian models, the steamy backrooms in gay clubs, etc. In page after page of the Sturm und Drang involved in female friendships and love affairs, Ayres puts her spunky, searching characters through so many relationship configurations and emotional roller coasters that the happily-ever-after ending is an anticlimax. The two female characters with the greatest chance of finding genuine happiness with each other part company and marry men, and Ayres has her characters jumping through too many unnecessary hoops to find true love. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
It has been said that yesterday's transgressions become today's nonnews, and also that conflicts in academia are as vicious as they are because very little is at stake. But welcome to Pennsylvania's Willard College for Women ("Where a Woman Chooses Her Own Destination") in the late 1970s, when it boasts a student-faculty ratio of nine to one, which, according to the glossy Willard catalog, makes for "close relationships" between students and teachers. Moreover, each freshwoman is assigned a big sister. Green-as-grass Elizabeth Breedlove knows she has much to learn, but doesn't know the half of it. Will she learn from "leathery" Dr. Beatrice Brock, who is vying for tenure (perhaps at any cost), in her popular seminar revolving around the Bronte sisters? Or from Dusie, with her unusually intense relationship with Elizabeth's big sister at Fey House? Of such is the tongue-in-cheek humor of Ayres' period story of coming-of-age at college. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
OTHER GIRLS BY DIANE AYRES (KENSINGTON, MAY 2002, ISBN: 0758201117) What really goes on behind the ivy-covered walls of a women's college? Welcome to the complicated life of Elizabeth Breedlove, a frosh at Willard College for Women. Her world is suddenly filled with lesbian vampires, lovesick professors, swashbuckling fencers, premature ejaculators, incarcerated therapists, supermodels, rapists, feminists, existentialists and, at long last, lovers. With OTHER GIRLS, debut novelist DIANE AYRES transports readers to a picturesque, cigarette-smoke-hazy academia where an unlikely love triangle -- or is it a quadrangle? -- is about to turn life at one of America's most elite women's colleges upside down. Weaving a tangled, colorful web of young and intense emotion, Ayres tells a seductive story about the pain of love and the burdens of growing up that evokes Donna Tartt's A Secret History, the academic romps of Robertson Davies and David Lodge, and even the work of J.D. Salinger. Smart, engrossing, hilariously literate and frighteningly accurate, OTHER GIRLS is set in the exclusive -- and currently endangered -- world of women's colleges. But its timeless narrative and startlingly human characters make it an equal opportunity page-turner about coming of age. Or, in the words of one early reviewer from OUT Magazine, "This debut novel from Diane Ayres is a frothy good time, packed with sex, seduction, betrayal, revenge, and a healthy addiction to midnight poker. We've heard this girls' school high jinks tale before, but it's rarely been this much good plain fun."

About the Author
For many years, Diane Ayres was an instructor at the annual Young Writer's Conference at Penn, sponsored by the Discovery Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a former contributing editor at Pittsburgh Magazine and a graduate of Chatham College. This is Diane Ayres debut novel. She lives in Philadelphia.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this smart and engrossing story about life at a women's college where you are perceived as either a virgin, a debutante, or one of the rumored lesbian vampires, Diane Ayres shows us what can go wrong, when things really go wrong. Here we see what a tangled web is woven from the fabric of young and intense emotion and as we see, the results can be disastrous. This is a story about the pain of love, of growing up, and of ultimately breaking out of the molds that are put on to us by family and peers. You need not have gone to a women's college to recognize the characters in Other Girls: Ayres's portrayal of life at a women's college, or indeed, any college, is frighteningly accurate. Diane Ayres does for same-sex schools what Donna Tartt did with The Secret History for mixed schools. A deeply engrossing book, Other Girls reads like a blend of Donna Tartt and J.D. Salinger.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly