A tragic thriller about curdled friendships and the dangerous thrills of the unknown, saddled with an ending that readers...
Two young Brits go backpacking in India, but only one comes back.
With all the arrogance and lack of planning that makes life in your early 20s so messy, a pair of British girls who have been friends since very early childhood—Gemma and Esther—arrive in India for a backpacking trip, circa 1989. Esther’s guilty, doomed narration makes it very clear that this trip will not end well for Gemma, and it’s mostly Esther’s fault. Gemma seems at first an unfortunate choice for a traveling companion, especially in India, as she develops heat rash, pines constantly for air-conditioning, and seems to have a passive-aggressive reaction to just about everything Esther does or says. But soon it becomes clear that Esther is almost more the problem. Arrogantly convinced of her own beauty, intellect, and strong feminist backbone, she obviously treats Gemma as her less-attractive and not-so-bright sidekick, a fact that even Esther starts to appreciate: “I was young and pretty and British and I suppose I thought I could behave exactly as I pleased.” Not to mention the fact that back home, Esther has been carrying on with the guy Gemma has a crush on and hasn’t told her yet. The trip itself is not much fun, as the girls spend most of their time fighting. Adding a hint of malevolence to the story is the arrival of full-time backpacker Coral, who brings the pair their money belt that Gemma had let fall from her bag. Esther cares not a bit for this New Age interloper, but Gemma gloms on to her immediately, regardless of her creepy intentions. The strange trio find themselves at a shrine in the jungle, and Coral becomes excited over the tradition of self-immolation—a combination that foretells a not-so-happy ending. First-time novelist Gardner spins a strong, atmospheric story that unfortunately falls too often into horror cliché. But her rendition of Gemma and Esther’s friendship will reverberate with many young female readers who might appreciate a more relationship-centered spin on the backpackers-gone-astray trope of Alex Garland’s The Beach.
A tragic thriller about curdled friendships and the dangerous thrills of the unknown, saddled with an ending that readers will see coming about 40 pages away.Pub Date: April 23, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-933-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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