What Girls Learn: A Novel

by Karin Cook

Overview

A touching novel about girls and their mothers, sibling rivalry and kinship, and the mysterious tug between love and antagonism that lies at the heart of every family.  
 
The year Tilden turns twelve, her mother, Frances, falls in love and moves the family north.  Soon the watchful, wise Tilden and her rebellious younger sister, Elizabeth, are navigating a new household amidst the awkward and alluring terrain of adolescence.  But when Frances suddenly discovers a lump in her breast, her daughters must confront the unpredictablility of her illness.  With heartbreak and humor, these characters exposes a world of secrets and learn to survive in the face of life's contradictions.  
 
This moving, emotionally stirring debut novel will appeal to fans of Anna Quidlen's One True Thing and Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here. Funny, haunting, and unflinchingly truthful on every page, What Girls Learn is a book that will be read—and cherished— for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679769446
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/28/1998
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries Series
Edition description:	Reprinted Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.23(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Lexile:	850L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Karin Cook graduated from Vassar College and the Creative Writing Program at New York University.  An activist and health educator, she currently lives and works in New York City where she is the development office at The Door, a multiservice youth center.

What People are Saying About This

Kaye Gibbons

By turns wry, heartbreaking, and wise, this is a wonderful novel mothers and daughters should read together.
—(Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster)

Editorial Reviews

Karin Cook's compelling first novel leaves readers with a sense of the truths and half-truths adolescent girls learn, know, and want to comprehend. Cook's lyrical novel [is] one of the most mesmerizing and moving narratives written on female adolescence, breast cancer, [and] mother-daughter relationships. -- Lesbian Review of Books

Marcy Jane Knopf

"Mama raised us to be just." Tilden, the teenaged narrator of this engaging and moving first novel, tells the story of life with her beautiful mama, Frances, who has always been a romantic spirit. Tilden and her younger sister, Elizabeth, are uprooted from Atlanta to New York when Frances, a divorce, meets Nick and they move to his home on Long Island. Tilden fears not fitting into her new environment and, indeed, on the first day of school her classmates demand to hear her "talk Southern.'' Soon, however, she has a far more wrenching problem-her mother finds a lump in her breast that proves cancerous. Despite a courageous attempt to fight her disease and Nick's valiant support, Frances slides inexorably toward death. Tilden is a gem of a character, navigating all the complexities of adolescent friendships, sibling rivalry and burgeoning sexuality while dealing with her mother's illness. The details of Frances's decline are an undercurrent to the minutiae of daily life as filtered through a young girl's perceptions. Cook writes clean and direct prose, infused with just the right amount of the aggressive innocence and lyricism with which adolescents often see the world. Only occasionally does Tilden's wisdom seem artificial, the sage intrusion of some older voice. But because Cook has firm and restrained control of her material, the novel succeeds in avoiding the clichs of its potentially melodramatic subject matter. Cook's clear eye is unclouded by false sentimentality, and her ear is keenly pitched to domestic dialogue. An auspicious debut. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A year-and-a-half in the lives of two sisters, Tilden, twelve, and Elizabeth, eleven, born exactly one year, two weeks, and twelve hours apart, is the subject of this novel. Tilden and Elizabeth possess all the characteristics of pubescent girls, yet they are as different from one another as one day to the next, inside and out. The sisters recall spending their lives with only their loving mother, who has moved them from one place to another as life directed her. Their moves were never motivated by men in the past, until Nick Olsen came along. Suddenly, without notice (as usual), they are packing to go live with him. Their lives are turned upside down as their mother begins to share her love with this stranger and makes him part of the family-they are taken from the sunny South to the fast-moving, cold North; their relationships with everyone, especially each other, become hostile; their thirty-year-old uncle comes to live with them; and worst of all, toward the end of the book their mother gets cancer and dies, leaving them, in Tilden's view, with strangers. Sexual play and innuendo become a major part of the narrative about halfway through, making the story realistic as it relates to the experiences of girls this age. Tilden spends the night with a family that dwells on sexual word play and sex jokes. The girls encounter a motorist seeking directions, who turns out to be an exhibitionist. Tilden has an incestuous encounter, involving touching, with her Uncle Rand. The emotional roller coaster and honest ride on which this story takes readers make it just right for girls who are mature and perceptive enough to identify and grasp the reasons for the fervent battles between the sisters, as they try to understand what is happening around them. They are angry with their mother for being sick, for being secretive with them about her illness, and for keeping them on the outside, and they resent the other adults who have come between them and their mother. Readers will feel as frustrated by this heart-rending story as Tilden and Elizabeth are while they attempt to deal with each other, their own individual development (they each turn a year older in the story), their mother's illness, questions about the life their mother shared with their father-whom they have never known-and the many changes affecting them. This is a book for girls, and those who read it are likely to be filled with questions. There is plenty here to fuel discussion, and younger, less mature YAs-especially those who identify with the sisters-might require that; older teen readers will likely be more inclined to work through the questions and frustration on their own. VOYA Codes: 5Q 2P J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written, For the YA with a special interest in the subject, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

VOYA - Faye Powell

YATeens will need a box full of tissues when they dive into this emotionally involving debut novel. Teetering on the brink of adolescence, narrator Tilden and her slightly younger sister Elizabeth are initially wary when their mother, a hopelessly romantic optimist, moves the small family from Atlanta to suburban Long Island to be with her new beau, Nick. Tilden has some difficulties adjusting to the changes in her life, but Elizabeth jumps right in with her new, fast crowd and never looks back. Tilden is finally beginning to feel more comfortable when she is faced with the unconquerableher mother finds a lump in her breast and fails quickly despite aggressive treatment. Cook has a deft touch in capturing the domestic dialogue of family life, the alternating innocence and wiseass cynicism of preteens, and the ache of a mother who tried to do the best for her girls. Tilden is a delightful character as she lurches through the uncertainty of constantly shifting friendships and venomous sibling spats just like any typical adolescent. Mature readers will detect the glimmer of humor under the sadness of this grieving family.Susan R. Farber, Ardsley Public Library, NY

School Library Journal

From the Brooklyn-based Cook, an earnest coming-of-age tale featuring two sisters from Atlanta whose mother dies of breast cancer—standard first-novel fare that never provokes, never offends, and never sparks much interest, either.

Twelve-year-old Tilden has always been a quiet observer, lingering on the edge of the more vibrant world inhabited by her prettier younger sister, Elizabeth, and by Frances, their optimistic, homily-spouting, divorced mother. When Frances returns home to Atlanta from a wedding up north, Tilden watches anxiously as a flurry of romantic correspondence with a man she met there turns into yet another move. Happily, though, this journey to Nick Olsen's home on Long Island turns out to be a healthy one: Nick, the owner of a limousine service, is a good guy who helps the girls with their homework, cleans up around the house, and works hard to live up to his new role of substitute dad. The girls' adjustment to this new life would appear relatively painless, in fact, if it weren't for Frances's discovery of a lump in her breast, her subsequent mastectomy, and her lingering death over the course of Tilden's 13th year—an event that leaves the two girls with no one to look after them but bumbling Nick. This bomb dropped into the center of Tilden's life might be expected to cause some interesting shock waves, but in fact the adults who surround Tilden and Elizabeth prove so adept at helping the girls adjust to the pain of losing their beloved mother that there's little doubt they'll land on their feet. Even when Frances's no-account brother, Rand, turns up for a visit and makes a half-hearted sexual pass at Tilden, he so deeply regrets his transgression that there's nothing for the reader to sink her teeth into.

In the end, this drama remains, like its sturdy heroine, well- intentioned but bland.

Kirkus Reviews