A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship.
Kim’s English debut is a descent into the dark world of a teenage girl.
Crystal lives in P City, South Korea, where she attends high school, cram school, and extra tutoring. Her life, full of intense academic pressure and economic privilege, is devoid of much adult oversight. We meet her in a living room with her best friend, Mina, and Mina’s brother, Minho. They listen to Kim Gordon, order pizza, and, as “a game, a joke,” Crystal begins to strangle Mina, leaving marks on her neck. In some ways, Crystal comes across as a typical, confused teen. She has a boyfriend who she thinks may be immature. She's a good student who feels she may merely tell adults what they want to hear. But she has a warped and widely vacillating self-image: “She is perfect because she is unfeeling and doesn’t know love." Still, Crystal may not be unique in her numbed, fragile mental state. Suicides are common among her peers, and a classmate’s suicide ruptures Mina and Crystal’s friendship. Throughout the novel, teen dialogue is rendered realistically, perhaps to a fault; it is nearly impossible to distinguish the voices of friends who come to sound so much alike. As Crystal slips further into delusions, pagelong paragraphs pull us deep into her mind, an uncomfortable, claustrophobic place to be. “There are too many people who ought to be killed,” Crystal writes in an assignment and then deletes. Kim’s prose is focused, sharp, and unflinching, even—and especially—in the novel’s gruesome scenes. We see the color of blood mixed with milk, for instance. It is “the color of strawberries.” The novel is full of such vivid details, difficult to read and more difficult to forget.
A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-931883-74-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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