“College Girl” appeared in the Setonian mailbox. I volunteered to read it because I’ve done book reviews in the past. I try to keep an open mind when I read, surrendering myself to enjoy even the most terrible writing-I admitted to being a “Twilight” fan last fall.
I began reading “College Girl” with the same state of mind.
By Daniella Choynowski
Center Spread Editor
“College Girl” appeared in the Setonian mailbox. I volunteered to read it because I’ve done book reviews in the past. I try to keep an open mind when I read, surrendering myself to enjoy even the most terrible writing-I admitted to being a “Twilight” fan last fall.
I began reading “College Girl” with the same state of mind.
I really did feel for Natalie Bloom in the beginning. Some of the isolation she feels is not her fault. Natalie is a transfer to the University of Connecticut after two and a half years of community college. She states, “By junior year, students are firmly entrenched in their cliques” (4). But Natalie is not the friendliest person. People are generally nice to her, and she tends not to give them the time of day. She’s not a horrible person, but she’s a slave to her grades- “Girlfriends would distract me from maintaining my still-perfect-grade-point-average, the number I revered with the fear and love I had once offered God” (5). I can definitely understand the grade-slave thing, but I have accepted there is more to life than a 4.0 and try to be friendly to everyone.
Surprise, surprise, Natalie becomes melancholy about being a outsider, and not being invited to frats and keggers, which, by the way, evidently covered the U Conn campus. But Natalie is too intelligent for “that crowd”. And “that crowd” seems to be full of beefy, drunken athletes. U Conn is the place to go, for clichés, to earn their degrees.
Natalie yearns for something more, a boy who has substance. Her fantasies occur in the library, where “a great-looking guy would show up, a smart, non-frat, non-jock type” (13). And that man appears in the form of Patrick, the pot-smoking, literary genius in the making. After she met him, all the respect I had for Natalie went out the window.
I do think we can all sympathize a little with Natalie’s self-esteem problems in the beginning. No one likes themselves all the time, and Natalie’s self-criticism was sad at times: “I could never be that person, and so I had learned to avoid this kind of talk altogether with an air that dissuaded approach, an iciness that failed to be moved by hurt feelings, rejected egos” (16).
Natalie’s integrity flies out the window when she begins seeing Patrick, whom I could tell right from the beginning was bad news. I saw through the facade right away-but Natalie quickly became infatuated. “A priest could wipe away sin, but Patrick could wipe away insecurity, and in a different way than earning A’s could” (64). She becomes more concerned with waiting in keg lines than studying for Russian history, and takes up smoking pot. These acts seem trivial compared to what she does next. Natalie falls behind in her schoolwork yet does nothing about it. Why? Patrick, of course! He’s rude, uncouth and nothing remarkable. He’s not exactly a catch. Yet Natalie begins devoting all her time to him. The two spend the next half of the book doing “things” that not only are unprintable in this publication, but also made me want to vomit at times. And Natalie admits to herself that she does not like doing said things, but who cares? A boy is interested in her! He wants to be around her! (In case you can’t tell, I’m being severely sarcastic.)
Natalie does begin having vaguely suicidal thoughts as her downward spiral continues. Her brother committed suicide ten years earlier, and she never really accepted it. As her relationship with Patrick becomes more and more about personality and more about…other things, Natalie begins to understand and forgive her brother. And that’s when the redeeming moment comes. Natalie and Patrick, having been caught doing things in a public park, move to a new love nest: a graveyard near her house (how romantic). She becomes tired of the inane daily routine of drinking a six-pack and then…you know. She wakes up and is disgusted at herself for ever agreeing to do such a thing in a graveyard, and becomes disgusted over Patrick and his influence over her. I fully supported Natalie’s motivation for throwing a rock through Patrick’s windshield.
And so Natalie, having learned a tough life lesson about love, men and self-esteem, picks her life back up. She makes friends and begins seeing a boy, Jack, whom she effectively balances with studies. Life is good for once.
The author attempts to present Natalie as a typical college girl. I think we can all understand the difficulties of balancing work and friendships, but I don’t think the majority of girls on campus would throw everything they’ve worked for away for a guy who pays attention to them. Trust me, there’s so much more to life. It’s a shame it took Natalie 326 pages to find that out.
Never before, besides in a textbook, has it been almost painful to read a book. All that work for a pseudo-happy ending? It was kind of like reading “New Moon” all over again.