An entertaining, cheeky and simple memoir of a rogue teenage girl.
An erotic adventurer and former arts and culture editor debuts with a brusque, unabashed sexual memoir.
Cook shows her magnetic, cocksure attitude from the very start of her memoir when she relays her plan, at 13 years old, to give her virginity to a willing 19-year-old boy. She gives readers a taste of her impudent approach to sexual experience, but as the book progresses, Cook seems to become more self-conscious and mindful of her readers’ potential impressions of her. Even so, she lays out her actions neatly, with little self-reflection and no apology. In one exceptional episodic chapter, “Word to your mother,” she tells of spurning a lover who refused to perform cunnilingus on her: “I was not going to be with someone who thought going down on a girl was dirty, especially after the countless hours I spent with his cock in my mouth.” She reveals that she had some insecurities when she walked away from his house for the last time, but she maintained her conviction never to see him again. Cook sometimes unnecessarily attempts to justify her digressive tendencies, and her parenthetical interjections such as, “(bear with me)” only serve as distractions and interruptions. Often, the voice here has the momentum-driven, jittery qualities of an adolescent girl, but it will likely charm many readers. One particular chapter stands out: “Mission Abort” details Cook’s experiences being pregnant for a short period and then getting an abortion; she reflects on her changing body and other issues in a balanced, mature manner absent from most other chapters. In the “Afterword,” the author expresses her hope that readers won’t consider her a “man-hater” for telling stories of ill-advised relationships with “some of the shitty guys…I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.” “There are lots of great guys I have dated,” she admits. “But those stories are so goddamned boring you’d never want to read them.”
An entertaining, cheeky and simple memoir of a rogue teenage girl.Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1451582482
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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