White Girls: Stories

by Lynn Lauber

In 16 interconnected stories, readers follow a young girl as she chronicles the fumbles and multiple failures of her family and others like them. Loretta is split between the dull, predictable lives of whites like her family and the magical world of blacks.

Genres: Fiction

187 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but well written collection of stories, Lynn Lauber's White Girls does a great job capturing a small town in the early 1960s. Her novel's set in Union, Ohio and takes the form of a series of related stories that each show a side of this town: the department store downtown, the ennui of housewives, the grittier people at the edges of suburbia and a tense, dark underlying racial tension.

White Girls follows the early years of Loretta Dardio, who lives in a nice neighbourhood with her parents and brother. Her dad works at a department store and sells insurance on the side and her mom is a housemaker. It's facade masking their problems: their marriage is on the rocks, her mom is frustrated by her limited role in life and Loretta sometimes seems like the only person in her neighbourhood who's not prejudiced. Early in the book, a black family moves in nearby; they're frozen out by the neighbours, who start a watch and loiter around their house, acts of unspoken racism continuing until the family moves.

It's easy to compare this to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio because it takes a similar look at another Ohio town. But this book goes a little further into the thoughts and judgements of it's citizens. There's the forgotten old women, complaining to anyone who'll listen in a department store bathroom; the bar near the bowling alley where lonely people meet; the racism of the main character's family, which is never especially overt but is always there just out of reach. Lauber's done a great job at capturing small town life and the people who populate Urban.

White Girls is a good read, although at just under 200 pages, it flies by. It's gets a little dark, especially once you start poking around the corners Lauber hints at, but I'd recommend it to anyone. It's worth hunting down a copy.

[Monique · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew just breezing through these books LOL--- Love it, finished this one late last night and had to think about what to say as there was not a big plot just things happening..--too late last night to review so here are my thoughts....okay first so this book was less than two hundred pages in short story choppy chapter form and told about the daily lives of white girls or specifically one girl Loretta in particular and how she lives in the 1960's South Ohio with racial tension and economic hardships all around..The first half of the book follows Loretta as she grows up from a spiteful manipulative child to a rebellious hardheaded teenager caught up in a love affair with a forbidden black teenager..As she matures (not really) she spends her day pitying her mother, never really knowing her father and interacting with the neighborhood and community as a whole..Told in a series of short stories and anecdotes you get to feel the plight of everyone in town and it was entertaining in its tedium at best. The second half of the story follows the young black boy Luther and his family and tells how the blacks of the time lived in their community. You get to see alittle of each side's mentality towards the other as the whites feel the blacks are ruining their neighborhoods and are dangerous and shifty while the blacks feel the white people are entitled and spoiled and despite the similarities in both of their lives they continue to have strained relations..As Luther and Loretta begin secretly dating and a pregnancy results everyone is called to action, things change and nothing is the same again even after Luther is married and moved on....Cant say this book is memorable but it was sweet and interesting with well written short stories..Good book.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different book, but I liked it.

Part 1 Rosewood Avenue is compiled of little vingrettes of small town life in 1960's Ohio. Loretta relates memories of her life, family, school and fascination with life on the other side of the tracks. Her mother is opinated and probably a little depressed.

Part II Sugar Street is Loretta and Luther's love story. It's racial prejudice, young love, secrecy and a diverse couple confused with their emotions. The intensity of the relationship and the outcome is sad and challenges family values.

[Lupe · Rating 5 out of 5]

An underrated classic.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

White Girls is a series of vignettes about Loretta, a girl growing up in small-town Ohio in the 1960s. I prefer a linear narrative and feel especially unsettled when glimpses into someone's life jump around in time. Although there were moments I appreciated in Loretta's stories about her mother and herself, I did not feel I could get into the story until about 50 pages from the end, when we shift from Loretta's first-person disjointed recollections to a third-person narrative (and then we almost don't see Loretta again). Although I understood what the author was doing, I wanted to shake the characters. They all lacked agency, floating through their lives. And that's really frustrating.

[Margaret Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been on my shelf for several decades. Written in the 90s, it is set in 50s-60s Ohio and gives a heartbreaking picture of the intersections of racism and sexism. I'm glad I read it.