Very well written but alternately predictable and jarring.
English’s debut views a girl’s coming-of-age through the lens of her relationship with the thoroughbred her father leaves behind when her parents split up.
It’s the summer before Teagan starts high school, and tensions between Robert and Susanna French are evident—and skillfully rendered from the anxious, bewildered perspective of their daughter—even before he moves out to live with another woman. Teagan decides to go to a girls boarding school with a riding program not far from the family’s home in rural Virginia; that way she can get away from her shellshocked mother without cutting herself off entirely. She navigates the social complexities of her new environment while grappling with Ian, a headstrong, “seasoned foxhunter” bought to assuage Robert’s midlife crisis and not the easiest horse for an adolescent girl to handle. Short, brooding first-person interpolations from Teagan many years later suggest that things are not going to turn out well in the main narrative, which appears to take place in the late 1980s. Indeed, even as Teagan develops a rapport with Ian, her new friendships are faltering, her schoolwork is slipping, and her mother is worried enough to send her to a psychologist, caustically dubbed “the vampire” by Teagan. English’s stripped-down prose works well to convey Teagan’s increasing alienation as she decides not to go back to boarding school and pulls further away from her father after he announces he’s marrying the new girlfriend. But this spare style also gives the novel an oddly distanced quality; none of Teagan’s relationships have much emotional force, with the notable exception of her complex bond with Ian—which makes the impulsive decision that triggers the denouement all the more jolting. It doesn’t seem to fit what until then has been a fairly typical coming-of-age tale, and an epilogue set in Arkansas is simply baffling.
Very well written but alternately predictable and jarring.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87433-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
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
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