Scabrous and cleverly evocative of the confusion of emergent adulthood, Cross’s blistering prose lifts a familiar storyline...
A savvy, comic/gothic debut exploring the angry mania of teenage alienation.
With its characteristically sardonic title, Cross’s impressive, dark first fiction (a Betty Trask award-winner) is the extreme opposite of a sunny romance, more like a gathering thunderstorm, set in 1984 in a Yorkshire village where the stench of blood and guts hangs in the atmosphere—both the actual by-product of the local tannery and the symbolic fear of a serial murderer at large. Narrator Mona, 15, is a roiling stew of hormones and teenage disgust: “Sex, alcohol and crime were my only desires.” Her contempt begins at home, which she shares with her promiscuous father (a pub landlord), stepmother and obese stepbrother PorkChop. Mona’s mother left home three years earlier, then succumbed to cancer. Mona’s escape is to groom a pony belonging to the posh Fakenhams, whose wealth fails to insulate them from similar dysfunction. The parents are separating after Mr. Fakenham’s latest infidelity, the eldest daughter Sadie is dead of anorexia and younger child Tamsin is back home after trouble at boarding school. Despite the class divide, Tamsin and Mona are natural allies, united in irony, anorexic aspiration, booze and adolescent outrage. With both her parents absent, Tamsin invites Mona to stay and a period of vandalism and physical excess begins, tempered with sexual experimentation. Despite Mona’s commitment to Tamsin, she is also drawn into involvement with sleazy local photographer Phil, who takes pictures of her topless and reveals photos of another girl, Julie Flowerdew, who might be the latest murder victim. Themes of disappearance and death intensify, as the teenagers’ fantasies bleed into the real world and they manipulate Phil for cash while implicating him in the murder investigation. Although Tamsin’s intensity becomes suffocating, Mona fails to break away. The spiral tightens, and the story ends with an unexpected, horrific and collusive act of violence.
Scabrous and cleverly evocative of the confusion of emergent adulthood, Cross’s blistering prose lifts a familiar storyline to another level.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7475-7588-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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