A review by liralen
Dreams of Significant Girls by Cristina García
2.0
Not terrible, but slow. Set over the course of three summers (with a ten-years-later epilogue), Dreams of Significant Girls follows three (not very significant?) girls at a summer camp in Switzerland in the early 70s.
The spread-out timeline gives the three characters more room to develop, but it also means that a lot of that development takes place off-page. Shirin, for example, spends the year after their first summer in the throes of a nervous breakdown (or something like that) and comes back with something approaching a personality transplant, and it's not entirely clear why or how. A ton of issues and questions are raised, but they tend to drop off the page when the summer ends...except for the recurring questions of sex and relationships (and right back to sex), which I could have done with less of.
I was interested in the book in part because of the historical setting, but I was pretty disappointed on that score. There's subplot about World War II and the way in which it affected their families, and the epilogue touches on the way the Iranian revolution changed Shirin's life, but other than that...? Add modern technology, and the book could easily be set in the present day. So altogether...not really what I wanted.
The spread-out timeline gives the three characters more room to develop, but it also means that a lot of that development takes place off-page. Shirin, for example, spends the year after their first summer in the throes of a nervous breakdown (or something like that) and comes back with something approaching a personality transplant, and it's not entirely clear why or how. A ton of issues and questions are raised, but they tend to drop off the page when the summer ends...except for the recurring questions of sex and relationships (and right back to sex), which I could have done with less of.
I was interested in the book in part because of the historical setting, but I was pretty disappointed on that score. There's subplot about World War II and the way in which it affected their families, and the epilogue touches on the way the Iranian revolution changed Shirin's life, but other than that...? Add modern technology, and the book could easily be set in the present day. So altogether...not really what I wanted.