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A GIRL BECOMES A COMMA LIKE THAT

Name: A GIRL BECOMES A COMMA LIKE THAT
Author: Lisa Glatt
ISBN: 0-7432-5775-8

by Lisa Glatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004

Heartfelt but poorly built.

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Women apparently looking for love turn out to want much more—or something.

Newcomer Glatt makes a valiant try to parse the reasons for her characters’ behaving foolishly, but she doesn’t come up with much more than the usual mental anguish of troubled love and misdirected lives. Although the tale portrays a few different women, the bulk of its energy goes to Rachel Spark, a 30-year-old college instructor and poet recently moved back in with her mother, who’s being treated for breast cancer. Rachel has a thing for taking random new lovers back to the apartment in order to placate the growing despair she feels over her mother’s condition. The root of her problem apparently stems from the “first wrong boy” she slept with at age 13, after which “something inside me hardened . . . a girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing.” Other players include Ella, who works at the clinic where Rachel goes for an abortion after a one-night stand and who’s worried about losing her boyfriend to a co-worker; Georgia, a teenager who’s a chronic clinic visitor, smart in most ways but quite stupid when it comes to boys; and Angela, a mousy friend of Rachel’s who seems as bored with her as the author does. Taken by themselves, most of these women’s lives could be the material of good short fiction. Georgia, in particular, is fiery and purposeful, with an unapologetic edge and a grudge against pretty much everybody, but it’s not clear what purpose she serves here. Glatt’s interweaving of people and plots can sometimes hit a mark, mostly in allowing us to see her people from the inside and out, and she has a good feel for how one’s insecurities translate into risky behavior. But the whole thing skids off the road long before coming to any sort of conclusion.

Heartfelt but poorly built.

Pub Date: June 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-7432-5775-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NAKEDS
by Lisa Glatt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE APPLE’S BRUISE
by Lisa Glatt

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.