Title: The Talk-Funny Girl Author: Roland Merullo
Published: July 5, 2011
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 320
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world. Marjorie is tormented by her classmates, who call her The Talk-funny girl, but as the nearby factory town sinks deeper into economic ruin and as her parents fall more completely under the influence of a sadistic cult leader, her options for escape dwindle. But then, thanks to a loving aunt, Marjorie is hired by a man, himself a victim of abuse, who is building what he calls “a cathedral,” right in the center of town.
Day by day, Marjorie’s skills as a stoneworker increase, and so too does her intolerance for the bitter rules of her family life. Gradually, through exposure to the world beyond her parents’ wood cabin thanks to the kindness of her aunt and her boss, and an almost superhuman determination, she discovers what is loveable within herself. This newfound confidence and self-esteem ultimately allows her to break free from the bleak life she has known, to find love, to start a family, and to try to heal her old, deep wounds without passing that pain on to her husband and children.
Roland Merullo’s pseudo-memoir, The Talk-Funny Girl, is an interesting and unique coming of age story. The author’s discussion of abuse, cult-life, and breaking away from one’s past were handled intelligently and without making a production of things. This is definitely a book that made me think.
Marjorie, the novel’s narrator, grew up in backwoods New Hampshire with violent parents on a mission to give her the “penance” that God wanted her to have. Over the course of The Talk-Funny Girl, the reader watches Marjorie mature enough to face the realities of her situation, and then make steps to turn away from her family’s lifestyle. It’s a slow, but very believable, process for her, and I thought Merullo was able to portray Marjorie’s distaste with her parents’ treatment of her as well as her loyalty and love to her only blood relations. It was a complicated situation, and I felt it was dealt with authentically.
The thing that definitely makes this book stand out, aside from the cult activity, is Marjorie’s dialect. It’s a very strange, broken English that she learned from her parents, and for some readers, I think it might impede reading ease and comprehension. I felt, though, that in the end the odd dialect added atmosphere and dimension to the story that would not have been there if Marjorie’s parents spoke the same as you or me.
The cult aspect, also, was handled well. From what I know of cult leaders and how they operate, what Roland Merullo presented in The Talk-Funny Girl seemed accurate. It was very easy to see how this man had brainwashed people into abusing their children “for their own good” and then running wild with that theme.
While not a perfect book, The Talk-Funny Girl was well-written and imaginative, portraying a harsh but realistic side to human nature that not many are comfortable dealing with. But bleak as Marjorie’s story was, I think there was a lot of hope and peace that came about through her own choices, which made it all worthwhile in the end.
