Set in Cincinnati during the summer of 1942, Roger Karshner's splendidly crafted novel, Getting Sentimental Over You, is a nostalgic story of a love found on the top deck of the "Island Queen," an old boat chugging slowly down the Ohio River. Getting Sentimental Over You is a highly recommended and original work of innocence, growth, and unrequited love set against a background of World War II's earliest days.

I couldn't find "Getting Sentimental Over You" in my local bookstores, so I had to order it. It was worth the wait.
The book is a marvellous portrait of a bygone time and the feelings experienced by those who lived it. Not only did the author awaken memories from my very young childhood, but he also created pleasurable experiences for me that might have been. The book is wonderfully "old timey," in the sense that the writing appears to be contemporaneous with the period about which it is written. Every description - music, clothing, behavior, personal insights about well known personalities - seem to be observed in the course of real life experiences.
When "Getting Sentimental Over You" is made into a movie, the filmmakers will have an easy time of it because the author has already created all the images for them.

A beautifully written love story that will take you back to the Big Band days of Tommy Dorsey. This book is a quick read that will fill your heart and soul. I truly enjoyed it and recommend it highly for the romantic in all of us!

This book is a great tool for new and advanced actors. I have been having my acting students use it to retreive audition material for the past nine months and they have been very sucesfull in getting those hard to get roles. The author has written the material so even a new actor performing in their first audition can be sure that they have left a strong impact. If you haven't had any luck in the past using someone elses material, then give this one a try and i am sure you will be very surprised at the result.

This book is an amazing collection of monologues, for every type of reader. I personally used it for an audition and it went great. This book has every type of monologues from sad to hilarious. Get this book if you are an actor, director, writer, or just a reader.

The problem with this book is that the monologues sound like students getting up in front of class and giving a report that was assigned to them. They don't sound like monologues where there is a strong need to affect another person and try to get a response from them immediately. The topics are good, but they don't sound natural. They're too speechy, like you're saying them to the world for no reason.

This book is a very easy to read and has really great monologues. I hope Karshner comes out with another book.

In my theatre class my teacher had us memorize one of the characters. They were easy to memorize and they were about real teen issues.

First of all, this book gives a lot of stellar monologues for actresses of all ages and talents. I loved the selections that were included, and I felt that there were a variety of choices. However, the book did not have footnotes or ANYTHING to decipher the language, so you would need a separate Shakespeare dictionary if you wanted to understand some Elizabethan phrases. Also, the setup was confusing and not very convenient to use. For example, before every monologue there is an italicized description of the character and the situation, then there is the actual monologue in plain text. I found this setup, which often spanned a number of pages, annoying. Also, the author pasted together speeches (sometimes awkwardly) without even noting that he had done so. This may not make much of a difference, but it did somewhat irk me. Don't get me wrong; the book is a useful resource, but mostly because of the size and selection. If you aren't concerned about size (it actually is pocketsize and highly accessible,) then there are plenty of other Shakespeare monologue books out there. Final verdict: Compact and accessible, but awkwardly formatted and pasted together at times.

I enjoyed this book because many of the monologues were well written, and allow the actor to play with the character. The comedic ones were very funny. Unfortunately it doesn't mention from where these monologues were taken or who wrote them. It might have been in the back of the book, I only took a quick read at it, but I wish it would be included in the pages with the monologues. Nonetheless, the monologues were great. I laughed out loud in the book store when I read them. And the dramatic ones were exactly that... dramatic, which allows for some good ol actin'. Good Buy!

Another book of monologues for teenagers which are just ramblings. I'm a high-school actress, and my mother bought me this book. I used one monologue from the men's section, because the women's monolgues, I felt, were just not appropriate for most audition or performance settings. These monologues were not taken from plays, which I prefer, and are very bland and juvenile. To perform these would be an insult to one's ability. There is so much great material out there, and none of it is in this book.

This book has a variety of fairly short monologues for teenaged boys and girls. The subjects range from very serious (child abuse and alcoholism) to very funny. They are fairly well written and up to date. I use them in acting classes that I teach.

It is amazing that a supposed authority on accents, Dr. Stern, would be associated with this book (and especially the cassette that goes with it.). He is - allegedly - a dialect coach to the Stars. It may explain some of the atempts at foreign accents that have recently come out of Hollywood. The accents on the cassette are nothing short of embarrassing - A cringe a minute. I asked a fellow actor to listen to the French accent and guess what it was: He guessed Spanish! If you want a first rate book on accents, buy Robert Blumenfeld's "Accents - A Manual for Actors". Now where do I go to get my money back?...

I recently bought the CD version of this, and I am compelled to warn people who are thinking of buying this. If you are at a;; serious about learning dialects, do NOT buy this CD. ... A high school drama student would have done a superior job. You would be better off learning dialects from the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live. This is not an exaggeration, this is a flat out warning. Don't waste your money. ... Pygmalion is old school cockney. Not modern. You want authentic Cockney? Try "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Love, Honor and Obey." They're the best. "Scum" and "The Krays" are also pretty good. And that's on the authority of a real cockney girl (my girlfriend).

I own nearly all of Dr. Stern's Accent/Dialog books and tapes, including "Dialolect Monologues" I and II and over 20 of his individual accent/dialect tapes (example: Acting With an Accent/Norwegian & Swedish). While I do feel that it is worthwhile to own Dr. Stern's tapes in order to complete one's libary of accent/dialogue books and tapes, I do not feel that Dr. Stern's tapes are the best of the bunch. If I could only choose one author's accent/dialogue tapes I would not choose Dr. Stern's. Dr. Stern's system has several flaws. The first flaw is that Dr. Stern is a "one man band", meaning the only voice you will ever hear is Dr. Stern's. By contrast, two of the three other accent/dialect systems I own include lots of recordings of actual natives speaking the dialects. The second flaw is that Dr. Stern chooses dialects that bias towards educated middle class. For example, his tape on New York City accent does not teach the normal Brooklyn/Bronx dialect of the "Dese and doze, toity toid street" variety, but instead uses as his standard a sort of mildly Jewish middle class Manhattan accent as the single dialect he teaches on the tape. Similarly, his tape on the Polish dialect sounds so sanitized and educated that its really hard to tell what accent it is other than being mildly European and educated. Similarly, his Italian tape is of a European, educated person instead of the lower class Italian that one would expect to hear included on a tape devoted to Italian. A third and severe flaw in Dr. Stern's single-dialect tapes is that he repeats every exercize first in standard American and pauses for the student to repeat it, and then says the word or sentence in the dialect and pauses for the student to repeat it in the dialect. This effectively wastes about a quarter of the tape, as it doesn't teach anything to hear and repeat the words/sentences in standard american. A forth flaw is that Dr. Stern is obsessed with his pet theory that each dialect must resonate from a unique portion of the mouth cavity. Dr. Stern wastes from ten to twenty minutes of each of his hour long single-dialect tapes going on and on about the point of resonance of the dlalect. This is mind-numbingly boring to hear more than once, so one ends up fast forwading through it when listening on subsequent ocasions. The two accent/dialect systems that I recommend are not currently offered by Amazon so I will not give their names. Hopefully at some point Amazon will expand their selection of accent/dialect tapes. It would also be extremely useful if Amazon had a cross reference system in place so that one could show all video tapes or recordings that, say, give examples of a Cockney accent, an Irish accent, etc. For example, the 1938 video of Shaw's Pygmalian is an excellent example of Cockney, but one must figure this out on one's own as Amazon does not list videos by the accent/dialects they use.

Having taught teenagers for many years, I've concluded it's better to deal with actual plays than books like this. Filled with a middle aged person's views of teenage language and issues. And every issue is nailed in the most obvious almost preachy manner. I think I found only one speech in the entire book my teens would find believable.

I bought this book without anyone to review it and when i received it i was beyond dissapointment. it is only 56 large-typed pages. Only 15 short monologues for each sex. As a teenage actor, i liked the fact that the topics were serious and heavy: sexual abuse, murder, substance abuse but they are kind of unrealistic to the point of not enough discomfort/sorrow can be expressed through the words. The language is a little off and i have to substitute modern words for "neat" and some other problems.

This is a review on "Volume I". It is a warning for those contemplating buying Volume II".

It is amazing that a supposed authority on accents, Dr. Stern, would be associated with this book (and especially the cassette that goes with it.). He is - allegedly - a dialect coach to the Stars. It may explain some of the pathetic atempts at foreign accents that have recently come out of Hollywood. The accents on the cassette are nothing short of embarrassing - A cringe a minute. I asked a fellow actor to listen to the French accent and guess what it was: He guessed Spanish! If you want a first rate book on accents, buy Robert Blumenfeld's "Accents - A Manual for Actors". Now where do I go to get my money back?...

I bought volume 1 of this series and I just wanted to warn people who are considering buying this. If you are serious about learning dialects, do NOT buy this. If you think it would be fun to learn some different dialects and want to have a remote chance of fooling anyone, do NOT buy this. A high school drama student would have done a superior job. You would be better off learning dialects from the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live. This is not an exaggeration, this is a flat out warning. Don't waste your money.

While the actor who read each instructive monologue was talented, he has some weak points, (White South African was too close to Australian). The only "authentic" voice was russian. Also, each dialect could have been applied to the same text, rather than applying to culturally specific topics. Then, differences in pronunciation, emphasis, would be more evident.