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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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