Spare and intriguing but unresolved.
In this novella, a girl leaving foster care plans to move in with one of her Internet boyfriends.
Almost 18, Angelique knows that in “three days the system wouldn’t want her anymore. Which was fine with her.” Angelique can’t wait for freedom—even though she lacks a job, birth certificate and high school diploma. A pretty blue-eyed redhead, Angelique figures one of the three potential boyfriends she’s lined up on Internet dating sites (but hasn’t met) will give her a place to live. “She had been locked up long enough, and nobody was going to tell her what to do anymore. She would be telling them.” Though the reader at this point may be filled with dread on Angelique’s behalf, nothing too horrible happens as she seeks out one Internet boyfriend, then another, in isolated, remote locations. Being abandoned in a Florida motel by a marijuana grower and then picked up by a sex trafficker isn’t so bad: “[S]he still felt stupid about that. But it had been a place to stay for a while, even a place with a swimming pool. She had liked lying out in the sun.” She’s happy, not dismayed, to discover she’s pregnant. In her debut novella, Casebeer employs a minimalist, pared-down style reminiscent of writers like Raymond Carver, the kind that powerfully leaves things unsaid. After a girl commits suicide in Angelique’s group home, “Nobody wanted to go back to the cottage, but there was nowhere else to go.” Casebeer shows a nuanced understanding of the forces that get and keep a girl like Angelique in her situation: the troubled families, the difficulties with anger and impulse control, the overwhelming need for love. And Angelique is never just a victim (her hero is Lisbeth Salander). The novella is unfinished by design, a choice not all readers will find satisfying. Angelique’s story continues every week as an online serial, the author explains, inviting readers “to vote on what happens next in Angelique’s life.”
Spare and intriguing but unresolved.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615923697
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Serealities Press
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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