Unsavory deeds at a girl’s preparatory academy shatter a rare friendship between two students.
Debut novelist de Gramont (stories: Of Cats and Men, 2001) employs an elegiac voice in this memorable if uneven novel based on the plethora of prep school scandals. After she’s caught in bed with her impossibly decent boyfriend John Paul, teenaged Catherine Morrow is forcibly enrolled at the Esther Percy School for Girls, an austere New England institution whose effect is akin to putting all the rotten eggs in one basket. There she develops a life-altering bond with fiery redhead Skye Butterfield, the spoiled but defiant daughter of the region’s Kennedy-esque senator, Douglas. “Some people can’t help but pull you into their messes,” warns Catherine’s former best friend Susannah, and Skye quickly proves it with increasingly erratic behavior. Fueled by a voracious appetite for drugs and attention, Skye joins an environmental protest to purposefully derail her father’s burgeoning political power; is nearly attacked while hitchhiking with an innocent roommate; and viciously tempts Mr. November, an unbalanced male teacher whose wife left because of Skye’s machinations. Any story that begins with its heroines cutting lines of cocaine on a toaster oven can’t end well. But the author inhabits her placid protagonist Catherine and her ill-fated counterpart to dramatic effect. It’s difficult not to like the well-meaning Catherine despite her unwise choices (the urge to wave her away from self-destructive Skye arises frequently). This is especially true during the novel’s denouement, as Skye betrays her one true friend and then pulls her final disappearing act. A subplot involving Catherine’s halfhearted pursuit of an equestrian championship is distracting, as is Susannah’s wildly improbable scheme to smuggle drugs from Venezuela to New England with the help of a dim-witted boyfriend. But when de Gramont focuses her gaze on her naïve, doomed muses, the book soars.
A transfixing confessional about the secret lives of dangerous girls.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-565-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and...
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What if the metaphorical Underground Railroad had been an actual…underground railroad, complete with steam locomotive pulling a “dilapidated box car” along a subterranean nexus of steel tracks?
For roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative which is, at once, more jolting and sepulchral than the classic firsthand accounts of William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup. Its protagonist, Cora, is among several African-American men and women enslaved on a Georgia plantation and facing a spectrum of savage indignities to their bodies and souls. A way out materializes in the form of an educated slave named Caesar, who tells her about an underground railroad that can deliver her and others northward to freedom. So far, so familiar. But Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels (Zone One, 2011, etc.) playing fast and loose with “real life,” both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet by giving the underground railroad physical form. This train conveys Cora, Caesar, and other escapees first to a South Carolina also historically unrecognizable with its skyscrapers and its seemingly, if microscopically, more liberal attitude toward black people. Compared with Georgia, though, the place seems so much easier that Cora and Caesar are tempted to remain, until more sinister plans for the ex-slaves’ destiny reveal themselves. So it’s back on the train and on to several more stops: in North Carolina, where they’ve not only abolished slavery, but are intent on abolishing black people, too; through a barren, more forbidding Tennessee; on to a (seemingly) more hospitable Indiana, and restlessly onward. With each stop, a slave catcher named Ridgeway, dispensing long-winded rationales for his wicked calling, doggedly pursues Cora and her diminishing company of refugees. And with every change of venue, Cora discovers anew that “freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, the empty meadow, you see its true limits.” Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller’s deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass’ grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft’s rococo fantasies…and that’s when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is.
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53703-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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