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.

"Funny...lively and wry, insightful and poignant. [A] psychedelic and unsettling journey into a Southern heart of darkness."-- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Funny and touching...Ellen's voice is immensely likable, start to finish-deadpan funny, smart, and on to herself." -- Boston Globe

"Blanche Boyd is irreplaceable. There is no cast of mind with quite the same savor, no humor quite so droll, no insights which reverberate in quite the same pitch. Her style [is] sure, true, and vastly pleasurable." -- Robert Stone