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The Talk-Funny Girl

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 993 ratings · 233 reviews

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal socie...more

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published July 5th 2011 by Crown

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Mar 10, 2013 Katherine rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Margee Smith, Joan Grady

Shelves: 2013, contemporary-fiction, domestic-fiction, family, literary, young-adult

Very powerful. A powerful tale of a girl who has grown up in isolation in rural Connecticut, who speaks an unusual form of English. Her parents, afraid of contact with other people, are under the spell of a wicked preacher. Reverend Pastor Schect preaches that children are evil, and must undergo "penances". Now 17, Marjorie Richards is beginning to pull away from her fearful & cruel community. Her aunt engineers a job for her away from her parents where she works with a slightly older young...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Christa Sgobba rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was an interesting read: powerful, affecting, and more than a little odd.

The book's about 17-year-old Marjorie, who's looking to find work because her parents have decided a "full pay" job is necessary from her. She finally finds work with a gentle, young man in his 20s whose dream is to construct a beautiful cathedral in town. (While Marjorie is working and going to school, her mother sits around and smokes, while her father putters around the woods and collects permanent disability) Her p...more

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Sep 07, 2012 Jendimmick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Majie Richards (MAY-gee REE-shard) is being raised in a shack in the deep woods of New Hampshire by ignorant, isolationist and abusive parents. She didn’t go to school until someone reported the truancy to the authorities when she reached the age of 9. By then the back woods English dialect she spoke was so engrained that her language and learning skills appeared irredeemable, and she was shunted into low level classes despite her true intellect. At the age of 17 Majie is forced to seek work in...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Krista Stevens rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, young-adult, fiction-adult, girls

Fascinating, powerful, and odd, this novel tells the survival story of 17 year old Marjorie who is being raised by her isolated, mentally ill, and eccentric parents in the poorest part of New Hampshire. The horror her parents subject her too and how she justifies and then rejects their beliefs is powerful. I might even have given this a 5 (it takes a talented writer to make the reader continually hope that the parents will redeem themselves because they are too have something in them that is lik...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Yvonne rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an inspiring, uplifting and sadly, very believable novel. I found my eyes filling with tears and my stomach tightening as I willed the seventeen year old girl at the centre of this story to find her way through the pain and dysfunction of her life and come out stronger on the other side.
This is the story of Majie, only child of parents who are basically illiterate and caught up in a bizarre church (cult) where the infliction of humiliating punishments on children is demanded. All punish...more This is an inspiring, uplifting and sadly, very believable novel. I found my eyes filling with tears and my stomach tightening as I willed the seventeen year old girl at the centre of this story to find her way through the pain and dysfunction of her life and come out stronger on the other side.
This is the story of Majie, only child of parents who are basically illiterate and caught up in a bizarre church (cult) where the infliction of humiliating punishments on children is demanded. All punishments are humiliating in some form, but these are diabolically designed to break the spirit. Majies parents are under the spell of Pastor Schect and adhere to his every hateful word.
The family is extremely poor, and live in a wooded lot in the wilds of New Hampshire. Majie is her parents conduit to the outside world because they shun society.
The story opens with Majie having to find full time work to bring in more money to support her parents who refuse to work. The family speaks their own version of english, a mixture of reversed tenses and unnecessary, sometimes made up words.
Secrets abide in this story, some of them unthinkable, but as Majie and the other people in her life start to work through their own difficult pasts the results change everything and everyone.
I was struck by the authors insight into how difficult it is to see our own circumstance sometimes, and what courage it takes to undertake that personal insight and find it in ourselves to invoke change and move forward. This all takes time, and insights into ourselves and others can't be rushed.
Majie finds her path to healing through personal courage and through the courage of others who share with her and through example, lead her toward a better life. A key component of this story is when Majie apprentices as a stonemason to build a small version of a cathedral in the centre of town. Her relationship with Sands, the young man building the cathedral, and the process of handling the stone, learning the skills to build, and working physically hard day in and out form the framework of Majie's journey. And when Sands asks her what she likes to be called, she chooses the name Laney for herself and through that small step starts to move away from Majie and become in Laney, the young woman she wants to be.
I don't often recommend books, but I am recommending this one. A powerful story, that I could imagine reading in one sitting because it's grip is so strong.
And finally, I was struck by the gift and ability of the author, who is a man, to develop a fully realized seventeen year old girl. (less)

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Aug 19, 2011 Lynn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ron Merullo is an amazing, gifted, imaginative…. I could just go on and on…. storyteller. Talk Funny Girl is one of the most compulsive reads I have come across in a long time. Marjorie’s story is not a pretty or pleasant one. She has spent seventeen years living in a shack in the woods, speaking a dialect peculiar to her family, being raised by a psychotic mother and a slow and damaged father. Calling themselves Christian, these parents, with the blessing of the pastor of their small fundamenta...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Steve Auerweck rated it 5 of 5 stars

At 17, Marjorie's future is bleak. She lives with her uneducated, abusive parents in an isolated shack in New Hampshire. They are all part of a small sect that meets in a Quonset hut and follows the word of a far-right, racist, fundamentalist preacher. And the family talks in a convoluted dialect that may owe its roots, distantly, to French Canadian.

Fortunately, Marjorie hasn't run out of hope, and there's an aunt who's on her side. We follow as she tells her tale of finding an unusual job and w...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Cheryl rated it 4 of 5 stars

Marjorie Richards lived a sheltered life. She did not know much about the world other than school, home and her parents. This has something to do with the fact that young girls have been kidnapped around where Marjorie lives. Marjorie does not mind living a sheltered life. In fact her and her parents have created their own language. It is kind of like their own form of pig Latin. The way Marjorie talks you would like she lived in the back woods. The other kids do not get Marjorie and have nick n...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: bookclubs

Recommended to Amy by: co-worker

Shelves: 2013

A great bookclub choice.

A young woman, subject to isolation and religious fervor is abused and manipulated... As she turns 17 her life begins to change, and she begins to see that there is a world outside what she knows, that hope may actually be something she can do, that maybe her life isn't destined to be punishments and worthlessness and poverty.

Im not sure how Roland Merullo got the internal thoughts of a traumatized young woman so accurate. As a survivor of childhood abuse (of a different...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book strongly reminded me of The Glass Castle except that it is fiction. Set in northern New Hampshire, The Talk-Funny Girl is a coming of age story of a young girl with a family so dysfunctional that all they do is sit around and drink/smoke/chop wood in their shack in the woods and speak in a nearly incomprehensible backwoods dialect. 1) I hate the term "coming of age" so I am not sure why I just used it, except that it seems the most apt term, 2) the story's trajectory is less than a yea...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Mimi Jones rated it 4 of 5 stars

A 17-year-old girl breaks away from her punitive, religious-zealot family just in time.

Marjorie Richards is smart and beautiful, but she is ostracized in high school because of her peculiar way of speaking -- a dialect with Middle English patterns to it, cultivated in the paranoiac isolation of her family's backwoods existence. Mom and Dad live in the remote New Hampshire forest and barely subsist on Dad's poached deer and Mom's minimal competence with canned and processed foods. These nominal...more A 17-year-old girl breaks away from her punitive, religious-zealot family just in time.

Marjorie Richards is smart and beautiful, but she is ostracized in high school because of her peculiar way of speaking -- a dialect with Middle English patterns to it, cultivated in the paranoiac isolation of her family's backwoods existence. Mom and Dad live in the remote New Hampshire forest and barely subsist on Dad's poached deer and Mom's minimal competence with canned and processed foods. These nominal adults drink and have loud sex and disappear for days at a time leaving Marjorie on her own, but their views on childrearing and the world are rigidly moralistic. These views come from a newsletter called True Home and Country, an anti-government screed that advocates punitive child-rearing as a safeguard against the intrusions of a godless society. Also influential are the teachings of "Pastor" Schect who runs a do-it-yourself hellfire and brimstone church in a Quonset hut far from prying eyes. The parents mete out pastor-sanctioned punishments to their daughter according to their own whims, usually in response to some small show of spirit on her part: these punishments go by the sinister names of "boying," "facing," and "hungering" and do more to break the spirit than to injure the body, though they do that too.

Escape is tempting, but the outside world is frightening to Marjorie, especially since girls have been disappearing in the region and turning up dead. However, she meets a shy young man newly arrived in the area who hires her to help him build a small stone "cathedral" on the site of a burned-down church in town. Gradually he wins her trust, though he is half-black and her parents have taught her to suspect black people. She also fears for a while that his interest in her may be because he is the serial killer and is cultivating her for his next victim.

As their friendship grows, he tells her that this church will be open to all and a place of love and healing. He confides that he himself is recovering from the betrayal of a sexually abusive minister when he was a boy. Together he and Marjorie's aunt -- her mother's half-sister -- give the girl the support she needs to leave her family and seek a life where love and hope rule and the "museum of pain" can be locked up tight and, except in nightmares, never visited again.

An unusual novel with a heroine you fear for and root for. Merullo deftly handles suspense and inventively renders Marjorie's distinctive way of speaking. I was interested in the contrast of two kinds of religion: one that sees God as love and one that sees him as a vengeful sadist. The message of redemption through the work of creating art resonated strongly with me.

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Jun 10, 2012 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: chick-lit

My review is more of a PSA than a book review! ;) As a social worker, The Talk-Funny Girl broke my heart because of the truth and reality of the story. It may be slated as fiction, and the author states in the very beginning that it is strictly fiction, but I guarantee there are girls out there who can tell this same tale of their real life even today, in 2012. I never caught the time period of storyline but it is still a sad fact that adults ignore these types of signs in our neighborhoods, sch...more

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Sep 06, 2011 Susan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels, narrative-medicine

To praise Roland Merullo's recent novel THE TALK FUNNY GIRL as a roadmap for overcoming abuse is to miss the point that it is artful fiction. True, it is didactic, but its careful structure and magnificent use of metaphor raise Merullo's novel to the level of Dickens's HARD TIMES and Christina Stead's MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN.

Let's start with the title. The narrator Marjorie Richards was a linguistically deprived backwoods New Hampshire girl who as an adult looks back at the turning point in her l...more To praise Roland Merullo's recent novel THE TALK FUNNY GIRL as a roadmap for overcoming abuse is to miss the point that it is artful fiction. True, it is didactic, but its careful structure and magnificent use of metaphor raise Merullo's novel to the level of Dickens's HARD TIMES and Christina Stead's MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN.

Let's start with the title. The narrator Marjorie Richards was a linguistically deprived backwoods New Hampshire girl who as an adult looks back at the turning point in her life, when her private world with her parents and the bigger world came into deadly conflict. The only way to describe her unspeakable experiences is with metaphor. Marjorie writes of her mother sitting on the kitchen counter drinking a bottle of cheap wine, "her legs jiggle as if small animals inside the jeans were trying to break free. Her hair, dark as used motor oil, had fallen loose and hung down the sides of her face....There was something methodical about the way she did it, something brutally efficient, as if she was feeling her way back, decision by decision, across an unlit landscape mined with regret." As an adult, Marjorie is able to understand the context for her mother's murderous regret at having left a comfortable home to marry and have an unplanned child with Curtis Richards, the feckless son of a mean backwoods man. The family goes to church every Sunday to hear murderous sermons given by Reverend Pastor Schect, a monster who hates children.

These three functionally evil characters are balanced by Marjorie and two wholly good characters, Marjorie's aunt Elaine, a nurse and stepsister of Marjorie's mother, and Sands, a troubled young man who hires Marjorie to help him build a cathedral to love on the ruins of a burned out church in town. Building the new cathedral to seems like a worn-out Hippy's whim when set beside the Reverend Pastor Schect's quonset hut church devoted to increasing the suffering of children and Marjorie's own museum of pain. The novel's elegant structure gives its message of hope enough clarity to be inspirational to younger adults; its use of startling metaphors is an unexpected pleasure for a reader of any age.(less)

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Jun 10, 2013 Kathleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This book was difficult for me. Perhaps it's my mood (you may notice that I am "currently reading" 3 other "fun" books that I just can't get into at the moment). Perhaps it's the subject matter. Who knows.

This book tackles an interesting subject--Marjorie Richards: a girl who has been raised to speak a family dialect rather than their regional dialect of English, a girl who has been humiliated by her parents' "church" (aka cult), and a girl who is only able to realize that she has a right to a g...more This book was difficult for me. Perhaps it's my mood (you may notice that I am "currently reading" 3 other "fun" books that I just can't get into at the moment). Perhaps it's the subject matter. Who knows.

This book tackles an interesting subject--Marjorie Richards: a girl who has been raised to speak a family dialect rather than their regional dialect of English, a girl who has been humiliated by her parents' "church" (aka cult), and a girl who is only able to realize that she has a right to a good life once she builds up the majority of a "cathedral" and gets tons of muscles and almost starves.

I don't know, I really struggled with this. I feel like it dealt with an important issue but kept sliding across the line into Lifetime movie-land. Don't get me wrong; Lifetime movies can be pretty great when all you want is to sit back and have a strange tale with an ultimately happy ending. But with this it just didn't seem to fit. It was too "Life is crap but this is what I got...Life is crap but this is what I got...I must deserve it...I must deserve it...ooh salvation!" for me...I've read other books about horrifying situations (check out Room by Emma Donoghue!!), and those seemed to be paced much more "believably." This one just has too much thinking without enough action, leading me to believe that the thinking shouldn't have happened either. (If you're going to ponder it this much, DO SOMETHING, don't repeat the pondering. It never evolves.)

Also, unlike some other reviewers, I never got my hopes up that the Richards parents would get their acts together. From page one Ma is very obviously a cruel, twisted woman, and Marjorie's father has no "normal" dad qualities to him. When Ma gets pregnant, honestly, for me it was to be expected. I'm relieved that the baby didn't have to grow up in that house after all, but I am still frustrated by how the story is ultimately wrapped up.

Also, I don't think that the abduction elements of the story were explored/justified enough. It's not enough just to have Marjorie think, "Oop, Sands might be the guy! Can't trust him!" every time she thinks life is too good. No; we need more ACTUAL worrying than just the occasional, "Oh, BTW, girls keep disappearing, this is an important thing." If it was important (WHICH IT IS!!), we should know a lot more about it. Otherwise, the ending is a little, "Wait, what?"

It's like...I like this book, but I probably won't read it again.(less)

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May 28, 2012 Cindy Huffman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-favorite

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I found out about this book from the Wake County Library's "Book-A-Day" Staff Picks. I was 40 pages into Hitlerland, which is, BTW, actually a really good book, but I think one week and 40 pages was showing that I was done with Nazi Germany for awhile. I'll have to pick that back up when I'm ready to learn more about history...

The books I'm actually ready to read are not ready for me at the library so I decided to see how this one would fare. It sounded interesting but not 'gotta-read-it-now!' i...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Teresa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-contemporary

I really loved this book. The characters were so interesting but completely believable -- not stereotypes. Merullo is an amazing writer and I am excited that I just picked up another book by him, "Breakfast with Buddha" which I will begin this weekend. In The Talk-Funny Girl (not such a great title), the main character is complex, interesting, likeable -- you want to enter her world and befriend her. The characters are real in the sense that they are never "all evil" or "all good" but that true...more

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Jul 04, 2012 Alexis added it

This is a book that, even having finished and appreciated it, I can't give a rating to. It is well-written and complex and challenging, and it deserves the awards it has gotten, but for all that it is an objectively good book, it is not one I'd ever be able to say "really liked it."

I don't know, if I had *really* understood, going into it, what the reading experience would be, if I would still have read it—it's certainly not a book I wanted to read. However, once I had enough of a sense of the...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Barbara Bryant rated it 2 of 5 stars

Something I read made me pick this up. Another person read it at the same time I did, and loved it, but I'm afraid it lost me. The premise of people living removed for the most part from normal society and having a sort of dialect of their own, a very circumscribed life and an isolated church congregation that offers "unusual" penances for sin, especially to children--I was curious.

In practice, it was very hard for me to listen to the character's voice--the strange speech grated on me, especiall...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Susanhayeshotmail.com rated it 5 of 5 stars

If the rest of the book is anything like the prologue this is going to be amazing.

Aug 8 - And it was. I loved this novel. I've had a hard time parsing out in my mind exactly why and though I gave it some thought after finishing it I am still struggling to capture the essence of my thoughts and feelings in a paragraph or two. It's a coming of age story with a mystery well folded in but even more than that,I shall attempt to figure it out the "more than that" as I write.

I was hooked at the prologu...more If the rest of the book is anything like the prologue this is going to be amazing.

Aug 8 - And it was. I loved this novel. I've had a hard time parsing out in my mind exactly why and though I gave it some thought after finishing it I am still struggling to capture the essence of my thoughts and feelings in a paragraph or two. It's a coming of age story with a mystery well folded in but even more than that,I shall attempt to figure it out the "more than that" as I write.

I was hooked at the prologue, written twenty years after the events that transpire over the course of the novel. Marjorie, the talk-funny girl, is now grown with children of her own and is considering her past, which she likens to a museum. Most of the time she doesn't think much about the images and events from her past that are tucked away in this museum but they are always on display there, waiting to be visited and, as is truly the case, things that happen in the present have a way of catapulting her through the doors of her personal museum to some pretty horrifying exhibits. She decides it's time to throw open the doors and windows and let the sun shine in on her past, engaging in a personal history project as she mentally and physically revisits the time and place of her growing up years.

What follows is the story of her seventeenth year when she was called Majie by her parents and the Talk-Funny Girl by just about everyone else. Her parents are, well, awful. Probably never the most stable of people they have joined a religious group that embraces some pretty bizarre doctrine and behaviors that seem to be generally founded upon the punishment of children. They have raised Majie to speak in a strange dialect, which was a little distracting at first but fortunately her thoughts are in everyday English, the first hint that there is more to Marjorie than meets the eye and indeed she has a use for the distance this dialect creates out there in the real world, somehow sensing from an early age that it also provides a kind of shelter or protection because the way she talks is not all that makes her different from everyone else. Her speech is an easy target that captures the attention of her teachers, classmates and everyone outside of her family, thereby drawing their focus away from other things she has less control over and holds closer to herself.

I love the strength of her character and the way, with some help from one faithful childhood friend, her aunt and a stranger who offers her a job and becomes a friend, she not only survives but transforms herself into a woman of power, wisdom and beauty - overcoming her fears, learning to trust, herself and others, forgiving without judgement while remaining true to her inner core. To quote from the prologue:

... Though the pain of my upbringing made me stronger, I can't say I'm grateful, and I would never wish anything like it for any other child on this earth. At the same time I don't let myself feel much self-pity. Hard things happen to people - that's the nature of the world - and, horrible as that can be, I believe there has to be some purpose behind it all. The questions isn't Why did this happen to me? but What do I do with it? The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years. You're walking through the museum with headphones on, listening to all that, your children and husband nearby, the world asking you to grow up, clean up, straighten out, pass on something good. What do you do?

That resonates with me, it's what I believe in my own inner core and I guess that's why I found Marjorie such a compelling character and loved this book. It's the something more.

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Apr 11, 2012 Laura Lee Anderson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fictional but written like a memoir, this story smacks of reality and with all my heart I wish it was. Not because of the horrors that go on in Marjorie's house, but because she escapes.

We know from the beginning that she escapes- it's written in the style of a memoir, after all- but the joy (and the heartbreak and the inspiration) is in the journey. It's a journey of broken people doing broken things but also broken people doing all they can to fix and be fixed.

Marjorie is an inspiration. Her d...more Fictional but written like a memoir, this story smacks of reality and with all my heart I wish it was. Not because of the horrors that go on in Marjorie's house, but because she escapes.

We know from the beginning that she escapes- it's written in the style of a memoir, after all- but the joy (and the heartbreak and the inspiration) is in the journey. It's a journey of broken people doing broken things but also broken people doing all they can to fix and be fixed.

Marjorie is an inspiration. Her determination and stubbornness are a double-edged sword: keeping her locked in her dysfunctional lifestyle but giving her the strength to finally break free. Her speech is enchanting and I wonder how much time Merullo spent making it absolutely perfect.

The surrounding cast of characters are appropriately imperfect and beautifully crafted. There are tiny glimpses of goodness or humanity in every single "evil" character. There are glimpses of selfishness or brokenness in every "good" character. Nobody is perfect and everybody believes they are doing the right thing.

Although this is by no means a Christian book, Marjorie's journey from believing in a god of vengeance and cruelty to a God of love and mercy is integral to her character's journey. Her reflections on spiritual things are genuine and nothing is forced in her slow, careful change in worldview. It is a gentle, gradual change and always begins inwardly before showing itself.

My favorite moment? The man working at the parking garage in Boston. I wept like a little girl.

I pray every day for the kids in an urban version of this town and this situation. I pray that they have the strength to be get out. This book was a beautiful insight and an inspiration for me.

So why 4 out of 5 stars? I don't know. I usually reserve 5 stars for books that I absolutely must rush out and buy. But there is nothing rushed about this book. Maybe, after mulling it over for a few weeks or months, I'll up it to 5 and go buy the book already. :)(less)

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Jun 03, 2012 Pamela rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Hard things happen to people--that's the nature of the world--and, horrible as that can be, I believe there has to be some purpose behind it all. The question isn't 'Why did this happen to me?' but 'What do I do with it?'" so begins this amazing novel, gripping from the start in a painful, powerful way. The story of Majorie Richards, and her fight to find peace, happiness, a God who is not angry. She searches for her peace and begins to understand what it may cost in her rural New Hampshire vil...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Partway through this book, I realized that I had (attempted to) read another book by this author: _Breakfast with Buddha_. I disliked that book so much that I never finished it. I'm so glad I didn't realize that this novel was written by the same author, because I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I had. And I loved this book, which takes place in rural New Hampshire. The narrator, a teenaged girl named Marjorie, lives with a mother and father who belong to a cult-like church and who separa...more

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Apr 08, 2012 Betsy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ya, favorites, contemporary

This book was really difficult to read, although it was really quite good. I second what others have said in their reviews, that this is a story about hope. I loved the narrator of this book and the journey that she makes throughout the story. It was a hard to read because it is about a lot of abuse that this young girl undergoes, but ultimately it is about how she deals with it and gets through to the other side. The hook for the book for me was finding out why they call her the "talk funny gir...more

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Oct 14, 2012 P.E. rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Talk-Funny Girl is the gritty story of a girl trying to find her place in the world. Marjorie has had so many obstacles holding her back, from her parents to a lack of money. She's still able to rise above everything and be better than even she thought she could be.

The story is contemporary and it shows the life of a reclusive country family. I thought the small town life felt realistic, but I've never lived in the country so I'm not sure how true that statement is. Nonetheless, this book h...more The Talk-Funny Girl is the gritty story of a girl trying to find her place in the world. Marjorie has had so many obstacles holding her back, from her parents to a lack of money. She's still able to rise above everything and be better than even she thought she could be.

The story is contemporary and it shows the life of a reclusive country family. I thought the small town life felt realistic, but I've never lived in the country so I'm not sure how true that statement is. Nonetheless, this book had a certain realness to it that most books don't. Life wasn't shiny and pretty in The Talk-Funny Girl. Life was messy. There are so many little things in life that sometimes people choose to overlook because they're not pleasant. These tiny details were included in Roland Merullo's book.

This isn't a story for everyone. It's not a story written just to be entertaining, there's more to it than that. I started out only mildly interested, and my interest grew as the story progressed. There are awful stuff in this book. There was one scene near the middle that enraged me. The things done to Marjorie were not fair and just seeing the way her parents reacted... The most incredible thing in this story is that the author gets the reader to understand the main character. She has love for her family but what they do is so wrong. That's such an important part to the novel and I think it's so skillful.

The most impressive part of the story to me, as a reader, was how the author brought all the characters to life, especially Marjorie's abusive parents. There are so many subtleties to their characters- you want to believe that deep down they're good, especially since there are glimpses of it, but then they act in another manner and it's heart breaking. Marjorie deserves better- all parents should be better. The reader hopes for redemption, or even retribution, but what happens fits. When it comes to the characters in the story, a lot of them have been through awful things but it's the way they respond that makes them who they are. Some hide from the world; some try to ease their pain by making the people around them suffer; some give back in an effort to make the world better for someone else than it was for them. That was powerful.

Overall, the little things in The Talk-Funny Girl are what make the novel special. There is suffering, there is hope, and there's life. 4 stars,

****

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Jan 25, 2013 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm to have enjoyed reading this to book. No, I did not type this incorrectly. This is how the "Talk-Funny Girl" talks! Raised by wackadoo parents, our narrtor, Marjorie, or Majie, has her mother calls her has some difficult living situations. Her father is very gruff, and often takes to abusing her, or "boying" her (which you will have to read to find out what it means), and her chain smoking trashy mother isn't that much better. Majie speaks in a very difficult kind of dialect, adding extra wo...more

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Jun 27, 2011 Natasha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc

I received an ARC of this book from Crown Publishers/Random House - my first ARC, thank you! When I started this novel, I began to prepare myself for disappointment...

Marjorie, the main character, was raised in the back woods by her parents and sheltered from the rest of the world. She didn't go to school until she was nine years old. As a result, she picked up her parents strange manner of speaking - for example: "I'm at beside the 112 Store on the road that goes for to town. In a little time I...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Kristin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads, books-i-own

An incredibly heartbreaking book that still manages to be hopeful. I just finished it so I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts! It was like seeing a car accident...awful and haunting and unpleasant, but you can't turn away. I had to keep reading to find out how Laney made it through everything. I loved watching her character change with the building of the cathedral, going from her fearful existence into something different.

I saw two of the bigger things coming, things that happened in the e...more

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Aug 07, 2012 Sherrie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: family-drama, young-adult-books

The Talk-Funny Girl is a novel about Majie, a teenage girl who lives with her abusive parents. Majie and her parents live in rural New England are are members of a strict religous sect. The pastor takes the commandment to honor thy mother and father to an extreme level. Children are subjected to a variety of corporal punishments doled out by the minister. Majie has few friends and is teased at school because of the strange way she speaks. When Majie lands a job helping a young man build a cathed...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book. While it is sad - it's hardscrabble New Hampshire living, backwoods ignorance and cults, the story is a good one. Roland Merullo, a Massachusetts native once again captures the feel for the way people live - while it's very different than my life, reading this book only made me realize once again that while I wasn't born to privilege, I did have a great childhood and wonderful memories. His main character, Marjorie Richards (the talk funny girl) is a true hero - raising...more

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Apr 21, 2012 Irene rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Talk-Funny Girl was incredibly, mind-blowingly, exceedingly superb. I can't find an adjective strong enough to express how much I loved this book. It blows books like Speak and even Hate List out of the water. The characters were pretty well developed, and the plot was on the slower side but very smooth and realistic.

I have to say a big THANK YOU to Merullo for not writing the whole book in Marjorie's dialect, because that would be way too hard to read; I had enough trouble with The Knife of ...more

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Book Giveaways: GIVEAWAY: The Talk-Funny Girl: A Novel by Roland Merullo	1	5	Sep 01, 2012 03:45am

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Contemporary

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Realistic Fiction

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Adult

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Sociology > Abuse

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Young Adult > Coming Of Age

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About Roland Merullo

ROLAND MERULLO is the acclaimed author of twelve previous books, including Revere Beach Boulevard, In Revere in Those Days, A Little Love Story, Golfing with God, Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha and American Savior. Merullo has won numerous prizes, including the Massachusetts Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

More about Roland Merullo...

Books by Roland Merullo

American Savior: A Novel of Divine Politics

Golfing with God: A Novel of Heaven and Earth

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Quotes from The Talk-Funny Girl

“Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others” — 19 people liked it

“...it was like being in the start of an earthquake. Before that, whatever else happened, however bad things had been, you were at least sure the ground would stay still.” — 1 person liked it

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