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The Story of Six According to Claire

Name: The Story of Six According to Claire
Author: T H Building
ISBN: 978-1492958796

by T H Building ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2013

An ultimately unsuccessful attempt to eroticize abuse.

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An erotically charged novel with disturbing abuse at its center.

Students who fail their high school studies are sent to Repeater’s College, where they are taught discipline and respect via a deeply visceral method: caning. Any violation of school rules and it’s off to the Head Office to receive either four or six of “the best,” hardest, most precisely placed strokes of the buttocks, administered with a cane. Teenage Claire almost made it through her time at Repeater’s without a caning, but when she’s caught with a cigarette, it’s off to the office. She expects pain and terror—not the sexual feelings that arise in anticipation of the beating and during the beating itself. What awakens in Claire is, according to author Building, a sick, corrupt version of sexuality that can never be divorced from abuse. Claire discovers that only in her sexual explorations with Mark, another student who has been recently beaten, can she relieve her emotional and physical feelings of desire and confusion. The reader begins to see the extent of the damage done to these students as their friendships and other relationships are poisoned by fear and manipulation. Building attempts to turn a horrifying practice and a chronicle of psychological harm into erotic fiction for adults, even going so far as to describe both the beatings and sexual acts in similarly graphic detail. The problem with this endeavor is that, despite Building’s many disclaimers, readers are placed in the position of the sadistic tormentors and encouraged to draw erotic pleasure from descriptions of abuse. Building tries to distinguish BDSM—in which consenting partners agree on specific levels of pain administration and acceptance—from the book’s definition of abuse, in which there is absolutely no consent and the victims are used for the perpetrator’s own sexual satisfaction. But an unsettling confusion emerges when Building tries to arouse readers with descriptions of acts—some of which are rather poorly written; “female sex parts” appears a number of times—that, though they might turn on the characters, shouldn’t titillate readers.

An ultimately unsuccessful attempt to eroticize abuse.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2013

ISBN: 978-1492958796

Page Count: 274

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.