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
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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