Product Description

Meet Ginny Babcock - the forerunner to BRIDGET JONES It's the 1950's and 60's in Hullsport, Tennessee and Ginny Babcock is coming of age. Bouncing from one identity to the other, she adopts the values, politics, lifestyles and even sexual orientation of each new partner she finds. In this wise, funny and ultimately heartbreaking story, Lisa Alther explores the limited roles offered to women in this period - from cheerleader to motorcycle moll, bulldyke to madonna - each embodying important truths about the aspirations of the culture that created them. Honest, wise, funny and tragic by turns this is a remarkable novel in a class of its own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2910157 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Orginally published in 1976 and re-released as a Virago Classic, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks remains remarkably fresh and provides the perfect read for a plane ride into another time zone. The hilarious odyssey of Ginny Babcock, a Southern peach gone rotten, was a manual of self-determination and irreverent pleasure for 70s feminists. Incredibly raunchy and explicit about anal sex, orgasm, vibrators, Tantric sex, blue balls and lesbian trysts, it is hard to believe it was written before Annie Sprinkle became a post-porn icon. The colourful, ribald prose begins with Ginny's childhood with a mother who's "an aficionado of calamity" and a father who anticipates an ugly death after an accident with a wedding ring, then cuts to Ginny returning to the hospital bedside of her dying mum. Each family first is captured by a Kodak M24 Instamatic-- hence Kinflicks, but not Ginny's deflowering which is "as meaningful as the breaking of a paper Saniband on a motel toilet." When Ginny drops out of college, takes to the land and to lesbianism in a steam of boiling soybeans, the inadequacy of her rural expertise is brilliantly told. Her subsequent marriage is interrupted by a Nam deserter-yogi. Each identity shift is marked by impressive wardrobe changes: cone bras, cardigans buttoned up the back, girdles, Ban the Bomb T-shirts, patchwork dresses and finally sadly, polyester jumpsuits. In a deft finale, mother and daughter reconcile without sentimentality and Ginny learns how to forego a life of fruitless self- denial and look death and singlehood in the eye. --Cherry Smyth

Review
'An ambitious, funny, lucid and unfailingly honest novel ... No other writer has yet synthesised (the coming of age in the 60's) as well as Ms Alther has' THE NEW YORKER 'A strong, salty, original talent ... It made me wonder what Tom Jones would be like written now' DORIS LESSING 'Dazzling talent ... brilliant, compelling ... wildly ribaldly funny' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'An odyssey of a novel in which the heroine, American teenager Ginny Babcock struggles to find her true identity. The novel is in turn raunchy, extremely funny and a deeply serious offering. It is also unfailingly honest. It becomes a book about life and death told in a deft, refreshing and highly original voice' WESTERN MAIL 'A feminist classic (but don't be frightened fellas, it's a great read)' DEREHAM & FARENHAM TIMES 'It's the story of how Ginny became Mrs Ira Bliss IV but it's told in the most refreshing, honest, funny, invigorating way and it is very much a novel of its time' DRIFFIELD POST

DORIS LESSING
'A strong, salty, original talent ... It made me wonder what Tom Jones would be like written now'

Customer Reviews

this had me in stitches in stitches
Nothing Lisa Alther wrote has, for me, ever reached the heights of this first novel. Alternating chapters of Ginny Babcock coming to terms with her mother's approaching death in the present and recalling her upbringing set up a counterpoint between reconcilation and renounciation. It is a serious account of mother-daughter relationships and a searingly funny book that had me laughing so much in a hospital bed I tore my stitches. I continue to buy charity shop copies to give to my friends for the pleasure that it brings them, and to gain insights and pleasure from reading again every other year.

Sexy, smart, cool
This book is a remarkable story of the life of one woman, ginny babcock. Throughout the book you are surprised by the knowledge of he author and the many experiences she is able to write about so realistically. You develop with ginny from her first fumblings to her marraige and raising her daughter all the while battling to avoid becoming her mother.
If there is one weakness in this book it is only that the chapters relating to her mothers illness do not match the pace and excitement of those covering ginnys outside life. These chapters are essential to the story however and this book is well reccomended!