Thoughts On Girl Unmoored by Jennifer Gooch Hummer

I had been waiting, impatiently, to fall in love with a book this summer and I fell for this one.  It's not the kind of book I can discuss with long, sprawling, passionate sentences. I have no desire to nudge my way through a deep analysis.

This book is, at its simplest, good writing and good story.  It's quirky.  It's sweet.  It's sad.

It's a book with a lot to say.  In the kind of way that a quiet person becomes fascinating the more you get to know them, the more you come to understand that they are sincere, genuine, kind.  The best way to describe it?  This book has heart. And I give you just one excerpt, from the main character, a most tender, loving, flawed but funny heroine, a girl named Apron:

At the door, I looked back at all those people I didn’t know and thought about how small your heart is but how big of a space it takes up. And how, even though you can’t see it, that heart space grows so quietly across a room or up some stairs into someone else’s living room, that even if you never step foot in it again, the air in there is changed forever.

Another reason I loved this book is because it reminds me of a musical I have always loved and wanted to see but it came and went many years ago: the Tony Award Winning Falsettos by James Lapine and William Finn.  I am in love with the soundtrack and this cast of quirky characters.


Like Girl Unmoored, it features a group of people trying to find their way through love and loss during during the early 1980's and the first recognized cases of AIDS in the US.  And in each, there is a bright, beautiful young person who puts things into perspective for everyone.