Alice Hoffman is a really neat writer. Her style is simplistic yet detailed, YA yet complex, blunt yet beautiful. I would definitely like to read more books by her.

Local Girls follows the story of Gretel Samuelson through her difficult teen years, her parents’ divorce, her best friend getting pregnant at 16, her mom getting cancer, and her cousin’s divorce as well. As she stumbles into adulthood, she is depressed and drawn to a bad boy who breaks her heart, her brother throws away his future and gets heavily into drugs, and she still feels like nothing all that special.

This story is so well written; although Gretel goes through different things than the average teen, Hoffman chronicles it in such an easy-to-relate-to way. All the hardships that Gretel goes through, she makes it through them and has hope — things to look forward to. Things that may have seemed bad when she was younger, begin to fade away in the past, and as we watch Gretel become a young woman, the reader is impassioned by her courage.

I would definitely recommend this book to many young girls. I’m 20 and reading it really made me feel okay about all the stressful things that I feel like I’m going through at the moment. I just have to sit back and realize that they will come and go, and I’ll make it through the best that I can. Local Girls is an amazingly written novel of strength, passion, courage, and learned-wisdom.