Product Description

Surprising and wise, A Girl Could Stand Up is a novel bristling with charm. Leslie Marshall's exuberant imagination enchants the reader, while a deep current of wisdom lends ballast to an exhilarating story. The result is one of literature's most unforgettable young heroines. On an outing to celebrate Elray's sixth birthday, her parents, Barkley and Jack, are killed in a freak accident in the Tunnel of Love. The day of their funeral, a pair of woefully unprepared uncles is sent in to care for her: Uncle Harwood, a macho, hard-drinking photographer who's always on assignment, and Ajax, a thirty-something cross-dressing uncle who prefers to present himself as an "aunt," form an unlikely but wholly lovable pair. But the beating heart of this novel is the love story that develops between Elray and her friend Raoul. Their secret adventures take them from the crypts of the Washington Cathedral to a life-threatening swim in the waters of the Potomac River in their search for invincibility. Marshall, a true storyteller, has created a world that is hers alone. This book is compulsively readable and ultimately uplifting. It is a testament to a new idea of family in its imperfect but shining state.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1802807 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A six-year-old girl loses her parents in an accident and refashions her life under the tutelage of two bachelor uncles in Marshall's quirky, meandering first novel. Elray Mayhew's parents, Barkley and Jack, are electrocuted in an amusement park Tunnel of Love while celebrating Elray's sixth birthday. Her unlikely new caretakers are "Auntie" Ajax, a middle-aged transvestite who dabbles in amateur theater, and Uncle Harwood, a worldly photographer and rou‚. They don't get along with each other, but for love of Elray they move into the Mayhew's big home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At 12, Elray takes to exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the National Cathedral, where she meets a kindred spirit, 13-year-old Raoul Person. The two reenact the battle of Troy and fool around with her movie camera. When incipient sexuality pushes the two soul mates apart, other nutty, surprising characters begin to dominate Elray's youth, such as Rena Guilfoyle, the raw-boned Irish lawyer preparing them all for a big lawsuit against the amusement park, and Granny Harwood herself, the matriarch who was supposed to have died in a freak fire in Blackie's House of Beef 30 years before. Marshall's tale has all the necessary elements of a gently amusing novel, but they never really coalesce, largely because of Marshall's verbose, often bland writing. In spite of its charming premise, this coming-of-ager feels bloated.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Leslie Marshall is a freelance journalist and has written for The Washington Post, Real Simple and InStyle Magazine, where she is still contributing editor. She grew up in Washington D. C. and now lives in New York. This is her first novel.

Customer Reviews

Promising start, disappointing follow-through
This book could have used a good editor. For my money, the book ends on page 272; unfortunately, the book is 372 pages long. There are some seeds of good story telling here, but the writer doesn't trust herself to stay with her main characters and give the reader a satisfying journey with them. Instead, she introduces new characters right up to the last page of the book, relinquishing or giving short shrift to the ones we've grown interested in. I also found myself growing exasperated with the self-conscious quirkiness of the characters. A little goes a long way with a story like this, and it's much easier to relate to characters who who don't seem to have their idiosyncracies pasted on. The book jacket draws parallels between this writer and John Irving, and it's true to some extent. But it's Irving's weaknesses she seems to share, not his strengths, ie., his tendency to dispatch characters heartlessly, to throw in ill-advised and unnecessary plot twists, to leave us with the sense that we've spent a very long time with characters we still don't fully know.

Nevertheless, I was very taken by the premise of the book -- the child who loses her parents in a freak accident and ends up being parented by two flawed uncles. If she could have stayed with that, and the boy Raoul whom she finds in her loneliness, the book would have held my attention much more.

just a glimpse
i read the excerpt of this novel in the magazine _real simple_ and got hooked in just a few pages.... this is an exceptional novel and the author's style is not bland as one of the above reviews suggested, but rather intriguing. you may find yourself drawn in just as quickly as i did.

Not bad, not great
The only reason I read this book is because I belong to a book club and this was the selection. I voted for something else!

I liked the main character, and her best friend, and their activities made for really good reading. However, large parts of the storyline were sometimes tedious to get through. I found myself skipping ahead more than once, and only finishing because I didn't want to miss out during the book club discussion.

Maybe I just came from too "normal" a home, but I don't understand why so many novels have to center around dysfunctional or non-traditional families.

At least most of the adults in the novel had good intentions, and more redeeming qualities than bad ones, and there is a lot to be said for that. And, it was fun to read about the evolution of their family tradition, however weird.

I give this book 3 out of 5 stars. It is just OK, but nothing I would rave about and recommend to friends.