Read More: Anthropology of An American Girl

I saw Anthropology of An American Girl lying on one of the tables at BookCulture and thought it looked intriguing. One of the reviews said it was like crack! That sounded good. I added it to my list of books to read. Then I saw it for sale for half-price at Goddard's Book Fair. Surely the gods were smiling on me! Or were they?

This book was hideously bad. I so wanted to like it. I made myself finish the whole damn thing, and because it was so bad it dragged on for weeks. I wanted to give the author the benefit of the doubt. I really did.

The book follows Evie, an American Girl. We meet her in high school and stay with her past college graduation. Evie is pretty much the worst protagonist ever. She is a non-person. Totally passive, obsessed with her own thoughts, no interest in anything going on outside her head. She gets buffeted about by the men in her life like a paperdoll on a rainy day. Evie oozes through the book like a spineless, mute blob, but we are given to understand that everybody finds her irresistible. Reading this book is like getting stuck in the head of the most self-absorbed, vacant person you know.

Then there is the title. Unbeknownst to the author, anthropology refers to the study of humans. Plural. Groups of people. So the title "Anthropology of The American Girl" would make sense. "Anthropology of An American Girl" doesn't make sense.

Still, I thought maybe the author had a plan. After all, teenagers are self-absorbed. Maybe the writing was so overwrought because it was supposed to be like a real teenager's thoughts. Maybe she called it Anthropology of An American Girl, because a self-indulgent teenage girl would make the mistake of perceiving her own solitary thoughts as something of grand importance, something representative of an entire group. Maybe all this nonsense was culminating in some big ending that would make sense of everything. So I kept reading.

And then I finished, finally, and knew for sure that it was all not worth it. This book seems like a pretty transparent re-imagining of the author's own girlhood. It's almost embarrassing to read it. It doesn't seem like the passage of years has provided any perspective or wisdom in this case. It's really rare that I dislike books. I'm pretty easy to please. But this book was painful to read. Two thumbs down!

-Kristin