Local Girls

Local Girls is a 1999 collection of fifteen short stories by Alice Hoffman. The stories, which are interrelated, concern 12-year-old Gretel Samuelson, and the family members and close friends, mostly women, who immediately surround her and play a huge part in her life. The various stories are told, alternately, from these different women's points of view, and span ten years of Gretel's life. Like Hoffman's other works, Local Girls is generally classified as magical realism for the way its stories often incorporate the unexpected and supernatural into narratives that are otherwise realistic, even familiar examples of coming-of-age fiction.

The events of Local Girls take place in the small town of Franconia, Long Island. “Dear Diary,” the first story in the collection, sets the tone of what is to come. Protagonist Gretel explains, “One thing I’ve learned is that strange things do happen. They happen all the time. Today, for instance, my best friend Jill’s cat spoke... We experienced a miracle and now we’re looking for more, although Franconia, the town we live in, is not known for such things.” Gretel's matter-of-fact acceptance of phenomena as surprising as talking cats helps set expectations for the reader. Expectations that Hoffman easily meets and surpasses. In one story, for instance, Gretel's grandmother, Frieda, makes a strange request: she will trade her fading life for her cancer-stricken daughter Frances' life. The deal is – to an extent – successful, and soon Frances' cancer goes into remission; not long after, Gretel's grandmother passes away.

But that isn't the last of her grandmother, who returns later in “How to Talk to the Dead” as a passive-aggressive ghost. After Gretel's father marries another woman, the ghost of Gretel's grandma begins sabotaging his efforts to eat healthy and lose weight. Other family members struggle with personal demons. Gretel's brother, the subject of “The Boy Who Wrestled with Angels,” comes close to death on many occasions, and experiences a mysterious divine flame each time. In “Still Among the Living,” infertile Aunt Margot makes a deal with a witch. In exchange for her diamond ring, she is given the recipe for conception: she must eat a specially spiced avocado and then have sex twice – once in the moonlight, and once in the darkness. The magic works, and Margot conceives. Elsewhere, in “Examining the Evidence,” Margot experiences several miraculous signs: a plague of spiders, lightning, and a very targeted, roof-puncturing hailstorm.



Hoffman's free use of symbolic imagery, both magical and not, infuses her stories with a childlike wonder, although many of the themes explored are quite adult. Indeed, Hoffman balances the supernatural elements in her stories with insightful depictions of the mundane aspects of day-to-day life, and growing up. It is also worth noting that, for all the “magic” that exists in the literary world of Local Girls, it never takes the form of deus ex machina plot contrivances, or otherwise ineluctably leads to happy endings for her rich array of characters. In fact, several of the main characters in the collection die – aside from Gretel's grandma, her mother and brother also die. The former, in the end, does succumb to her cancer, and the latter OD's. Gretel also grows apart from her childhood best friend, Jill, who throws away her chance at escaping Franconia by getting pregnant while still in high school, and dropping out to marry the (rather dim) father of her child.

The loss of this friendship is as important to Gretel as any of her familial losses, but Hoffman brings Gretel and Jill back together in the final story of the collection: “The real reason Jill and Gretel haven’t seen each other much in the past two years has nothing to do with Eddie. At least not in that way. It’s jealousy, that’s the problem; it’s coveting something you’d never actually want in real life but still desire in your dreams... Each wants a bit of the other’s life. Not the whole thing of course, not the loneliness or the exhaustion, just the best parts, the prizes.” In this story, Gretel and Jill stumble upon a glowing firefly and watch it ascend so high into the night sky that they cannot tell it from the stars. Gretel decides that the firefly was, in fact, a star, who had to fly home to his kind or risk dying on earth. He was impelled, simply, to survive, and there is a poetry, Hoffman seems to indicate, even in that. A poetry that Gretel and Jill, despite their very different life paths, both understand.

Many of the short stories in Local Girls first appeared in periodicals or magazines (Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, etc.); this may be why half of the novel is written in first person, and half in omniscient third person. It also means that many characters are reintroduced, from story to story, as if for the first time.