The New Girls - by Beth Gutcheon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"The New Girls" is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep-school years in the tumultuous sixties. Into their reality of first-class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditionds collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality - blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times.

From the Back Cover

The New Girls is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep-school years in the tumultuous mid-sixties. Into their reality of first-class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditions collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality -- blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times.

Review Quotes

"Satirical and highly entertaining...a delicate moment of social history, the mid-sixties, when the old rules were being unlaced by the new girls." - Atlantic Monthly
"It's funny without sacrificing intelligence, intelligent without being pretentious. It's all-around good reading." - Boston Globe
"Gutcheon, a graduate of Miss Porter's and Radcliffe, clearly knows the way things were at such insulated boarding schools -- the teachers in charge, the kinds of girls, the way they acted, talked and dreamed, the bonds they forged, the shocks they survived as girls becoming women." - Publishers Weekly
"Gutcheon has an impeccable fix on time, place, and native customs -- and...pathos of a vanished youth." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is the story of those crucial relationships and of a harrowing loss of innocence." - Library Journal
"There is a Fitgeraldian quality in Gutcheon's portrayal of the space and beauty and order that money can buy... What we do come to understand -- or rather, to feel -- is what it was like to be among the young girls at this bastion of tradition and propriety in the early '60s." - New York Newsday
"The author moves in and knows the world about which she writes. Good entertaining reading." - Pensacola News