Female adolescence as imagined by one of the 20th century’s best—and most peculiar—writers.
A quirky coming-of-age story, published in 1976 and newly back in print, from a two-time winner of the Whitbread Award.
Her mother gave her the name Marigold Daisy Green. Then her mother died, and now everyone calls her Bilgewater—a pun on “Bill’s daughter” crafted by her father's students at a boys' school in the remote north of England. Bilgie knows that her dead mother and her glorious name make her seem like a creature from a fairy tale, just as she knows that, with her thick body and thicker specs, she’s no one’s idea of a princess. This doesn’t stop her from daydreaming about the magnificent Jack Rose. Nor does her awareness of her own inadequacies make her in any way jealous of the shockingly resplendent Grace Gathering, a childhood friend who returns—after being kicked out of two posh schools—to the home of her father, who's the school's headmaster. Bilgewater’s adolescence is filled with clichés both ancient and modern. Grace, for example, serves as Bilgie's ideal of the Lady of Shalott: uncommonly beautiful but maybe best dead and safely out of the running. In one weird weekend, Bilgewater will endure a gin-soaked party with Jack Rose’s parents and almost lose her virginity in a garret. But anyone familiar with Gardam’s work will trust the author to know what she’s doing with well-worn tropes. Gardam (God on the Rocks, 2010, etc.) clearly recognizes that motifs persist for a reason: because they conform to fundamental human experiences, because they fulfill basic narrative needs. And she also understands the role that stories might play in the life of a girl being raised by an abstracted, academic father. That said, Bilgewater emerges entirely as herself, a singular first-person narrator in control of her own story.
Female adolescence as imagined by one of the 20th century’s best—and most peculiar—writers.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-331-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at...
An iteration of a quintessential American myth—immigrants come to America and experience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but education and pluck ultimately lead to success.
Twelve-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong and feel lucky to get out before the transfer to the Chinese. Because Mrs. Chang’s older sister owns a garment factory in Brooklyn, she offers Kimberly’s mother—and even Kimberly—a “good job” bagging skirts as well as a place to live in a nearby apartment. Of course, both of these “gifts” turn out to be exploitative, for to make ends meet Mrs. Chang winds up working 12-hour–plus days in the factory. Kimberly joins her after school hours in this hot and exhausting labor, and the apartment is teeming with roaches. In addition, the start to Kimberly’s sixth-grade year is far from prepossessing, for she’s shy and speaks almost no English, but she turns out to be a whiz at math and science. The following year she earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Her academic gifts are so far beyond those of her fellow students that eventually she’s given a special oral exam to make sure she’s not cheating. (She’s not.) Playing out against the background of Kimberly’s fairly predictable school success (she winds up going to Yale on full scholarship and then to Harvard medical school) are the stages of her development, which include interactions with Matt, her hunky Chinese-American boyfriend, who works at the factory, drops out of school and wants to provide for her; Curt, her hunky Anglo boyfriend, who’s dumb but sweet; and Annette, her loyal friend from the time they’re in sixth grade. Throughout the stress of adolescence, Kimberly must also negotiate the tension between her mother’s embarrassing old-world ways and the allurement of American culture.
A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at the heartstrings.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-756-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.).
Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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