A first novel about the pain of growing up in a broken family that is determinedly shocking, relentlessly readable, and often as adolescent as its protagonist. Olivia Beckett is 14, with the body of a voluptuous woman and the scars of a wounded child. Her parents, acrimoniously divorced, are each involved in new relationships and barely aware of their daughter's unhappy existence moving back and forth between their homes in North London. No one, it seems, wants Olivia. Then comes Nick, her mother's raunchy, rough-edged new boyfriend, who is all too aware of the girl's nubile vulnerability. Olivia, raw and aching from her father's abandonment and her mother's neglect, quickly succumbs to Nick's caresses like a starving animal, offering the author myriad opportunities for over-the-top (and every other position) sex scenes. In between comes some wince- inducing writing: After her father's marriage to wicked stepmother Althea, Nick drives Olivia home and attempts to comfort her: ``She wept, burying her face against his designer shirt. She had a great ache, in her belly, in her heart. She had lost her father.'' (Then comes a sex scene.) A lot of this sounds like the diary entries of a perpetually horny and self-pitying teen—which, of course, Olivia is, but the author, we assume, is not. The sex-with-a-father-figure motif would work much better if the explicit details didn't so totally overwhelm the plot; you have to wonder whether the theme was conceived just to accommodate the sex, and that's too bad, because the book, like Olivia, obviously wants to be more than just a titillating ride. It just doesn't want it enough. Nonetheless, Inglis does manage to convey the destructive yet irresistible power of erotic obsession and, more profoundly, the loneliness, confusion, and sense of displacement that leaves children flailing in divorce's wake.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-88747-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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