An account of 11 women from Ames and their 40yr friendship.

This book brought back memories of different groups in high school and why I liked or didn't care for them. However the idea of maintaining close friends is so true and reminded me of how much I value the friends I have and the time spent with them. ( )

Respected the friendship's longevity. Wasn't enamored of the writing. ( )

This really didn't resonate with me. ( )

A closed group of young women who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and then scattered to eight different states following their dreams and establishing their careers. Through divorce, disease, and the birth and death of two children they gather together to laugh, cry, celebrate, and support one another. Zaslow also includes study results showing the difference of friendships between men and women and that women who have close friendships live longer. Despite being such tight friends, the girls are all very different personalities and it's very easy to become engaged in their story, even their mean girl incident involving one of their own. I stayed up past my bedtime several times while reading this book ( )

11 girls who became friends during their childhood years in Ames, Iowa remain friends almost 40 years later. This book looks at how their friendships formed, how they've evolved over the years, how they kept the friendships intact while being busy with children and jobs. Now scattered throughout the United Stares, the 10 remaining women still try to get together at least once a year for a reunion. ( )

I have to admit that I did not read every word in this book. I t was ok but not riveting. I liked the idea of a book about a group who have been friends forever more than I liked this book. ( )

I just finished reading The Girls From Ames, which is for my library book club meeting tonight. I started out liking the book. Then I couldn't get into it for awhile. I stuck with it and found myself really enjoying it.

The Girls from Ames is about 11 girls who have remained friends since they were young in Ames, Iowa. You learn so much about each girl and friendship in general. I really found myself thinking about friends I had in high school. I also saw myself relating to one of the girls that was shy and was confronted by the other girls from the group at a sleep over. It was intended to be a nice gathering and turned into a sort of mean girl event.

Sometimes when you grow up you don't realize that even though the world seems to be changing that things haven't changed that much. Girls have always been mean just not mean like the girls of today.

The challenges that each girl/woman has gone through in her life. I find myself now wanting to know more about how they are doing since this book was written. I know I will be checking out the website that was mentioned in the book. www.girlsfromames.com

I am glad I read the book and now want to renew old friendships. ( )

A reviewer on Amazon hit it on the head, saying that this story needed the skills of a novelist, not a columnist. I would have preferred to read the story chronologically, even though it would have been even more confusing to keep the girls straight.

As it is, I couldn't tell you which of the girls I liked best. And there were 11 of them! Marilyn had the most interesting story. Karla's tragedy is the most moving, and yet, they aren't depicted as fully developed characters.

It's a little clinical too. I could have done without the passages analyzing women's friendships, the differences between those and men's friendships and statistics about friendships that last. Thank you, I read women's magazines. I know all this. ( )

Having grown up in the Midwest, I could totally relate to the setting and the individuals. It made me wish I had kept up with friends who were an important part of my youth. I've now been an an urban East Coaster for more than 4 decades and few days go by that I don't imagine a "simpler" life...this book shows that no life is simple regardless of where you live... ( )

I loved this book. It was typical Iowa. I grew up 8 miles from Ames, so this was a great read for me. It stresses how important female friendship is as you age. ( )

There wasn't enough focus in this book for my taste. It just seemed like random bits of these women's lives, with no ultimate purpose or point. The book was supposedly about the friendships shared between the eleven women over 40 years. It was difficult to keep the women distinguished from each other, because none of them really stood out separately from the group. ( )

I was able to borrow this from a long distance friend (thank you Terri!) who won it from Goodreads First Reads giveaway program. It’s an advance readers’ copy, paperback, 317 pages. I’ve grown addicted to ARCs since joining Goodreads, my preference being to read actual to be published copies sufficiently ahead of the official publication date.

Except for the front cover, there are no photos included so I’m very glad my friend included information about the web site http://www.girlsfromames.com/ in her review. There are at least some photos there, and I printed them out and referred to them as I read. When I read memoirs, it really helps me to see photos and not have to imagine people’s appearances. This is one book I might have appreciated more if I’d not read an ARC. I hope the hardcover first edition copy is full of photos, of the 11 girls but also of their family members and others in their lives.

I wasn’t enamored of the format of the book at first. It was difficult for me to become acquainted with each of the eleven girls when so much was written about their relatives and ancestors, but I eventually saw the wisdom of the author’s decision to write the book this way. Although it took me longer to remember each of them, it was a richer experience once I was able to do so.

Also, it turns out I was most interested in some of the peripheral people.

I was most deeply touched by the story of Christie, the first child born to any the Ames girls. (This book was only a 3 star book for me until that part. I continued to enjoy the book more and more all the way through the postscripts.) I also really liked Marilyn’s father. Elwood Koelder, who was connected with Marilyn’s brother, was an interesting story line. A few of the events that happened in the most recent past were of most interest to me.

I had mixed feelings about these individuals and their group. They are ten years younger than me but, possibly given they came of age in the small town Midwest and I in a big city on the west coast, they seemed old fashioned, albeit racy. I ended up liking some more than others, but liked some aspect of each of them, although they felt sufficiently different from most of the friends I have that it was a slight stretch to think of being friends with any/most of them. Also, as I got further and further into the book I understood the friendship(s) better.

When their friendships were forming, I’m sure these girls would have considered me extremely backward and I would not have been welcome in their group.

Reading this book is bound to make women and girls think about their female friendships.

I am lucky to have a few continuing overlapping groups of women friends from my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, made all the more precious to me because of my lack of family. My groups consist of no more than four each and the most intimacy comes from the one on one relationships. I am somewhat in awe of these 10-11 women staying in contact as they have, especially considering geographical distance, families, their differences. ( )

I love fictional accounts of female friendships, so it's pretty much a given that I would love this book. The story of these women is inspiring. More than anything it makes me want to call all of my girlfriends and tell them how much I love them and appreciate them. Whether I talk to them everyday, once a week, once a month, or once a year, they are the women that have gotten me through tough times. I love my friends. ( )

perhaps too many memoirs lately, found the stories just okay and not enough time or enthusiasm to finish ( )

Since I have a group of friends that I've known since 8th grade, I was interested to read this book. The women in the book are both more numerous and younger than my friends and I, and were a lot more -- I don't know -- "normal" as teenagers than we were. But there are a lot of similarities in how their friendship has lasted, changed and grown over the years. Other women who have a long-time close group of friends will probably enjoy this book. In Zaslow's introduction, he points out many of the differences between men's and women's friendships; I'm not sure how many men would be interested in this book. Still, it would be fun to see what other men thought of it. ( )

I wanted to like this one more... I'm fascinated by the dynamics of female friendships- especially the longevity. Unfortunately, though the book SEEMED long, there wasn't enough detail to keep me interested. I alwo had a hard time with the girls being so quick to justify their actions with "we were only 15" or "we were only 18" or "we were only 22"... I wonder if 20 years from now they'll be saying, "but we were only 45"... ( )

A down to earth look into the lives of eleven girls who formed a friendship during their childhood years and continues even today. Now, 40 plus years of age and from all parts of the country, we read of times of happiness and also of sorrow when one of the women's daughter dies of cancer. One of the girls is now deceased and is mysterious as to what happened at the time of her death. They continue to get together at times. Brings back thoughts of when we were in high school ourselves and the things we did.

Also being a girl from Iowa, this book brought back great memories of my childhood. This book made me reflect on my childhood friends and how I wished I had stayed in contact with them the way the women of Ames have. I really enjoyed reading this great story of an amazing friendship and I think I will get in touch with my childhood friends and see if we can get together to talk about the old days. ( )

Made for a great book club discussion which surprised me. ( )

I really wanted to love this book. It's about a group of women who grew up together in a small Midwestern city in the 1960s and 1970s, and the ways in which their friendships have endured and changed through the years. In other words, it's about me — well, not me but my generation, the women who surrounded me throughout my own coming-of-age in a small Midwestern city.

Here's the thing, though: What I said about it not being about me? That's all too true. The girls from Ames are a group of 11 girls/women who were pretty popular, pretty wild, and pretty clannish about letting outsiders into the golden circle. They even turn on their own occasionally, as when a subset of the girls gets together one night in high school to carefully enumerate to one of the others all the ways in which she is simply not smart enough, pretty enough, or cool enough to be part of their group without making some drastic changes. It read like a scene out of a horror novel to me, which made it all the more dumbfounding to learn that the girl who was the center of all that vitriol still hangs out with all of them! Nothing about staying friends with people who treated you so cruelly makes sense to me.

I enjoyed the nostalgia of the pop-culture touchstones sprinkled throughout the The Girls from Ames. But to be honest, I kind of hated the girls from Ames themselves. And after reading about what they were like in high school and beyond, I'm pretty sure they would have hated me, too. ( )

This is a book that I have passed along to as many people as I can get to read it. I grew up in a smaller town than Ames, and I share many of the experiences of long-lasting friendships. I think Jeffery Zaslow handled the story of the women's roles in the friendship well. ( )

I absolutely loved this book. I finished it in one sitting. I was fastinated by the 11(10) women and how they have remained friends for over 40 years. Their stories amazed me and made me realise about my own friendships and parenting skills. ( )

I really enjoyed this book and could relate well to it as my daughter is of the age of the girls from Ames. Though a male author, Zaslow did a wonderful job bringing these girls to life. I want my 40-something daughter to read it. The pictures really added to the story. I referred to them often. ( )