Anthropology of an American Girl

Seventeen-year-old Eveline recounts the growing pains of a girl on the edge of adulthood. Rebecca Lowman's voice--soft, even, despairingly monotone--delivers the thoughts and experiences of the heroine. Growing up in the 1980s, Eveline experiences her share of bad relationships, deaths, and brutality. Lowman's performance suits the depressing story, which includes continual flashbacks that peel back the layers of Eveline's life, just as an anthropologist might. But in keeping with the literary device of detachment, Lowman's tone and pace never echo the traumatic and heartrending events in this young woman's life, creating a sense of despair rather than triumph. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 1, 2010
If publishers could figure out a way to turn crack into a book, it'd read a lot like this. Originally a self-published cult hit in 2003 (since reedited), Hamann's debut traces the sensual, passionate, and lonely interior of a young woman artist growing up in windswept East Hampton at the end of the 1970s. The book begins as a two-pronged tragedy befalls 17-year-old narrator Eveline: her best friend's mother (more maternal than her own) dies, and Eveline is raped by two high school students. Her brutalized interior, exquisitely rendered by Hamann, leads Eveline to a series of self-realizations that bears obvious comparison to that iconic nonconformist Holden Caulfield. The difference, though, is Eveline's femininity threatens to subsume her fragility. Over the course of the book, she falls deeply in love with a stormy figure who helps bring her to disturbing conclusions. Eveline—bent on self-destruction but capable of deep passion, stifled by circumstance but constantly blossoming—is a marvelously complex and tragic figure of disconnection, startlingly real and exposed at all times.