Giving witness yet again to the self-created drama of adolescence: a serious bullet of a book.
Teenage angst gets a surprisingly honest and effective rendering from a bright new voice.
Born with a raging fever and raised in a frightening, Manson-esque (without the murder) commune on the West Coast, Sara Shaw is a girl just trying to make it through her small-town high school. Her father’s a decent sort, benign and useless in a hippie sort of way, and at least he leaves her alone. Sara hangs with the burnout guys at school but doesn’t feel exactly fulfilled by their established rebellion, knowing that no matter how much Led Zeppelin they listen to or dope they smoke, none of them has any ambitions beyond their town. Sara becomes inexplicably obsessed with Justine, a furiously antisocial girl in the torn skirt of the title, and after randomly spotting and tailing her, gets caught up with a floating world of hookers and junkies who inhabit the town’s so-called “Red Zone.” At this vulnerable stage, her father decides to take off for the woods as part of his quest to lead a simpler life, and Sara’s slide into FTW (“Fuck the World”) behavior accelerates. School attendance quickly becomes a thing of the past, and before she knows it, she’s rooming with junkies and becoming fodder for cautionary tales. Launching into her narrative—“those twelve days when there was too much rain and I was burning and I found and lost Justine”—with seemingly no purpose, Godfrey offers few surprises in her story but constantly impresses with her precise eye and impassioned tone. This first-timer may not have opened new vistas of literature, but she brings this feverish girl fully to life on these rage-prone pages.
Giving witness yet again to the self-created drama of adolescence: a serious bullet of a book.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-009485-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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