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(More customer reviews)Jane Borden spent about a decade in New York City doing what apparently many a college graduate southerner does, and that is simply continue the "frat" life in the city that never sleeps. Jane divided her autobiography into three sections (Dive, Sink, Surface) to delineate the major epochs of her life in the big city. Within each section are chapters that are more or less stand alone short stories, rather than a fully conceptualized development of her experiences and reflections as she grapples with the dichotomies between New York and North Carolina.
In the first section aptly titled "Dive", Jane's dialogue is full of visual interest, and laugh-out-loud moments that will have you fully engaged as she literally seems to dive into a completely different life-style with North Carolina mores as her compass.
At the start of the second section titled "Sink", Jane relates the story about her Aunt Jane and the manners book. Here we begin to really get a feel for the differences between New York, and small town North Carolina. We also, get a glimpse of Jane's working and social life in New York. So there is an expectation that you're about to understand who Jane is beyond the surface. But that depth never comes, and with each subsequent chapter, Jane becomes oddly more and more distance as a person. As each chapter seems more random and haphazard, Jane begins to rely almost exclusively on her Thesaurus to form sentences. So awkward does the story telling become, that by the time the third section "surfaces", you really don't know who this person is, nor do you care.
The concept of this book was a great one, as was the promise of the first chapters; but the execution of the novel as a whole fell short, and really ended up as more of an outline of what a more accomplished writer might do. There never was a section titled "Swim", and that is appropriate here, for this story never quite does.
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Jane Borden is a hybrid too horrifying to exist: a hipster-debutante. She was reared in a propert Southern home in Greensboro, North Carolina, sent to boarding school in Virginia, and then went on to join a sorority in Chapel Hill. She next moved to New York and discovered that none of this grooming meant a lick to anyone. In fact, she hid her upbringing for many years--it was easier than explaining what a debutante "does" (the short answer: not much).Anyone who has moved away from home or lived in (or dreamed of living in) New York will appreciate the hilarity of Jane's musings on the intersections of and altercations between Southern hospitality and Gotham cool.
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