The revolution of little girls

No matter how hard she tries, Ellen Burns will never be Scarlett O'Hara. As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution Of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.