A picaresque novel for the new millennium.
A 14-year-old sensualist is the subject of Canadian writer/actor Garnett's mostly engaging comic debut.
Roanne Chappell is a piece of work. Mature beyond her years—she describes herself as having a body akin to the Venus of Willendorf—though still young enough to make foolish mistakes, Roanne takes to the road in search of her identity, even though she knows she's leaving behind a pretty wonderful life with Del, her fantastic, sexy artist mother, with whom she shares a loving if rather competitive relationship. And it's the competition that sends Roanne packing: Mother and daughter have slept with the same man, and Del can't guarantee it won't happen again. So Roanne, a budding artist, travels to northern California to visit Didi, a famous cartoonist she's never met. To her surprise, her idol, a homosexual dwarf, invites her to stay a while. Trouble enters with Pascal, gentle Didi's brother, who kindles Roanne's lust. Chasing Pascal down the coast of California, she falls into one adventure after another. She stays with old film stars turned evangelists in the Valley, then makes her way to Malibu, where she meets the sad Gilby, a wealthy, self-destructive teenaged girl who befriends the wanderer, and tracks Pascal to his bed. Roanne's new life of rock stars and Hollywood oddballs beats the high school life she left behind, but things turn more grave when she has to go to Mexicali for an underage abortion. Garnett is less interested in a serious exposé of the dangers confronting runaways, though, than in a slapstick account of one girl's bawdy adventures, notable mainly for the likeable, indomitable figure of Roanne herself.
A picaresque novel for the new millennium.Pub Date: March 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87306-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A good beach read, set in a beach town.
A fast-paced novel about the enduring friendship of three young women who spent their summers in Avalon on the Jersey shore before dispersing across the country.
The book opens with Kate, now a lawyer in the girls’ original hometown of Philadelphia. Kate’s fiance, a man she met in law school, breaks up with her the same day she learns she is pregnant with their baby. Then we meet Vanessa, now living in New York City. Vanessa has given up her career as an art dealer in the city to raise her daughter Lucy and is struggling with her husband’s confession that he recently came close to cheating on her. Then we meet Dani, an aspiring novelist who has just lost her job in a bookstore in San Francisco. Dani is still dealing with drug and alcohol addictions and is still looking for Mr. Right. When the three decide to get together and spend the 4th of July holiday back in Avalon, they are each haunted by memories of Kate’s twin brother, Colin, who tragically drowned there eight years earlier when they were all on the cusp of adulthood. Woven into the mystery of Colin’s demise are other issues of childhood that influenced each of the young women. As they look back on the painful past and flirt with future opportunities, the women finally share the secrets they had kept all those years, forgive one another and prepare themselves to move on in positive ways.
A good beach read, set in a beach town.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220381-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Hall (Waiting for the Flood, 2015, etc.) takes 10,000 geeky inside jokes and weaves them together with the challenges facing...
A young gamer meets the girl of his dreams in a massively multiplayer online game and is surprisingly OK with the discovery that the hot dark elf is a guy IRL.
Drew lives in two different worlds: The Real World, where he’s studying to be a game designer; and “Heroes of Legend,” where he and his avatar, Orcarella, have just joined a new gaming guild. He’s got friends in the real world, but he’d rather hang out with the Guild—particularly Solace, a beautiful healer he finds himself going on separate quests with and having plenty of late-night chats with, too. But now he’s in a crisis. Turns out Solace, his dream girl, isn’t actually a girl. Does Drew like guys? Or just this one? Or even this one? When he finally meets Kit in person, Drew is surprised by how OK he is with the fact that he's a man. The spark they discovered in “Heroes of Legend” is still there, and they're both willing to pursue it. As they fall deeper into a relationship that alternates between making out and playing video games, an intervention by Drew's IRL friends makes him wonder if he's too attached, both to Kit and the game. What starts out as a dense, vaguely tedious online gaming transcript evolves into a deeply real consideration of the ways people choose to pursue their passions and live their lives and people’s perceptions of those ways. The first chapter has the potential to lose marginally interested nongamers, but holding on drops the reader into the mind of Drew, who is at times incredibly well-adjusted and at others completely hopeless—in other words, a pretty authentic college student.
Hall (Waiting for the Flood, 2015, etc.) takes 10,000 geeky inside jokes and weaves them together with the challenges facing young people, whether they're nerdy or not, including game/life balance, understanding different kinds of friendship, and all the stops and starts of coming into yourself.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62649-446-6
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
