Inventive and affecting.
Dispatches from the life of a teen mom and budding feminist from the author of The End of Eve (2014) and Bluebird (2010).
“Write what you know, my women’s lit professor kept saying, but what I knew wasn’t shaped like a story and now I was a sophomore and I needed to write an underground feminist classic.” The protagonist, Ariel Gore, is a young woman trying to care for her baby and go to college while battling against poverty, male violence, her mother’s disappointment, and the idea that there is only one way to tell a story. In the short vignettes collected here, she describes childbirth, romantic disappointment, disordered eating, and artistic frustration. Ariel reads Audre Lorde to her baby and casts spells to protect their rented house from ghosts and hateful neighbors. There is no plot as such, and the only connective tissue linking these scenes is Ariel’s singular voice, by turns sardonic and vulnerable. The author has published memoirs already, and the decision to present stories featuring a protagonist with her own name and a recognizably similar biography as “a novel” is a provocative one. Certainly, it provides formal cover for some of the narrative’s more fantastic moments, such as when a blackbird gives Ariel a secret message and when her mother’s best friend turns into a possum and scurries from the kitchen into the backyard. The shape of the text, too, presents a challenge: it’s a concrete refutation of the idea that all stories should have the same outline. This book mimics the messy, discursive texture of memory—of life. At the same time, Gore’s insistence that Ariel is not her makes perfect sense in a book about the construction of an identity. In choosing novel over memoir, Gore is asserting that she is giving us her art, not her self. The themes Gore explores here are not new for her—in addition to writing fiction and autobiography, she was the founding editor of the parenting zine Hip Mama—but the craft and passion she brings to these topics make her second novel a welcome addition to her oeuvre.
Inventive and affecting.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-433-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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