“This book was engaging from the very first page, and demanded my attention throughout. This is a work that truly touched me, and I cannot recommend it more highly. It will change the way you look at life. The characters feel like family, and it was hard to leave them as I turned the last page. As soon as I finished, I wanted to read it again!”
— Hillary Smith, Copperfield's Books, Sebastopol, CA
This is what it’s like to be a high-school-age girl.
To forsake the boyfriend you once adored.
To meet the love of your life, who just happens to be your teacher.
To discover for the first time the power of your body and mind.
This is what it’s like to be a college-age woman.
To live through heartbreak.
To suffer the consequences of your choices.
To depend on others for survival but to have no one to trust but yourself.
This is Anthropology of an American Girl.
A literary sensation, this extraordinarily candid novel about the experience of growing up female in America will strike a nerve in readers of all ages.
“Remember what it feels like to be seventeen? Eveline Auerbach sounds like somebody many of us knew—or were. . . . A realistic, resonant, and universal story.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“As vast and ambitious as the country itself.”—Carolyn See, The Washington Post
“If publishers could figure out a way to turn crack into a book, it’d read a lot like [Anthropology of an American Girl]. 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. . . . A marvelously complex and tragic figure of disconnection, startlingly real and exposed at all times.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] page-turning read [that] rivets through a rawness of complex emotion . . . Like Jane Austin, George Eliot or Edith Wharton, [Hamann] critiques her era and culture through the tale of a precocious young woman buffeted by the accidents, values and consequences of her age.”—Providence Journal-Bulletin
“Utterly original . . . a rare kind of novel—at once sprawling and intimate—whose excellence matches its grand ambition.”—The Dallas Morning News
“[A] serious descendant of the work of D. H. Lawrence.”—The Washington Post