A glimpse into the life of a reluctant sex worker, featuring a sympathetic, if occasionally bland, heroine.
Debut author Jordan offers a fictionalized account of a young woman’s real-life experiences with crime and prostitution in Bulgaria.
Ionna never had a very peaceful childhood: “My father was particularly inventive in his punishments and in his beatings had no equal.” She ran away from home after suffering “things that would make your hair stand on end,” and eventually falls in with a young criminal named Krasi and his gang of miscreants. They steal from foreigners in seaside resorts, and their operation is small but very successful. However, the waves of excitement and spending come to an abrupt standstill when Krasi kills someone and must flee the country. After refusing to go with him, Ionna is left with limited money and a broken heart. She eventually finds herself part of a sex trafficking ring and becomes a prostitute in an upscale hotel catering to wealthy, foreign men. Her work is often painful and grotesque (“Even the memory of what that pervert did to me makes me feel ashamed”). How will Ionna survive such an existence? Jordan provides insight into the types of traps that might face a girl like Ionna, but although the young woman’s actions are clear, much of her interior life remains opaque. Occasional flashes of personality offer captivating details (such as when Ionna encounters a videocassette recorder: “…soon the film was beginning. It was called ‘Ghost’, a marvellous story about love, death and human morality”), but she can feel, at times, like any other girl stuck in hard times. A more complex picture of her inner life might have resulted in a more memorable portrait. However, Ionna’s constant will to survive leaves readers with a sense of understanding. If nothing else, the book succeeds in illuminating a broad picture of shady dealings and the people swept up in them.
A glimpse into the life of a reluctant sex worker, featuring a sympathetic, if occasionally bland, heroine.Pub Date: June 13, 2014
ISBN: B00LK2SGEE
Page Count: 215
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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