Review: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Review by Elle

Publication information: Virago Press / 30 Jan 2003 / 448 pages

Where I heard about it: This was one of my set book for my Open University course this year but it’s been on my radar for a while.

Spoilers: None. ZIP. Nada. To spoil even a little would be to ruin the suspense!

Review:

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Working as a lady’s companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers.

Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman.

I can confidently say that I have never once converted so many people to wanting to read a novel using nothing more than my Goodreads status updates. Furthermore, I can absolutely say that I haven’t read a single novel this year which has so completely lived up to its potential in the way that Rebecca has and, let me tell you, this year has been the year of good books so that’s really saying something.

“I do love you,” I said. “I love you dreadfully and I’ve been crying all night because I thought I should never see you again.”

When I said this, I remember he laughed and stretched his hand across the breakfast table. “Bless you for that,” he said; “one day, when you reach that exhalted age of thirty-six which you told me was your ambition, I’ll remind you of this moment. And you won’t believe me. It’s a pity you have to grow up.”

Rebecca had been on my wish list for what seemed like forever; it was one of those novels that I just never quite got around to. My interest was piqued earlier this year, however, by some intense research into JM Barrie (the author of Peter Pan for anyone not quite up on their British literary traditions) and his involvement in the du Maurier family (indeed, Daphne du Maurier called JM Barrie “Uncle Jim”). In all of the literature that I’d waded through in my quest to illuminate something real and tangible about Barrie, I kept tripping over the wan and distant figure of Daphne du Maurier, finding hint after hint of her troubled life and the way in which she achieved catharsis through her novels (something which somewhat disturbingly mirrors Barrie’s idea of catharsis). I am not, it has to be said, someone who is vastly invested in authorial intentions when I read novels – what the author intended doesn’t matter all that much after the novel and its ideas become the property of its readers – but I must confess to having a small obsession with dearest Daphne, so when Rebecca turned up on my set books list for my 20^th century literature class, I just about jumped up and down on the spot.

It would be impossible for Daphne du Maurier not to doff her cap to Charlotte Brontë in the telling of Rebecca; the intertextual links to Jane Eyre and the original tale of The Other Woman linger softly around the edges of the novel from the first page and converge like a smog on the tale as we claw ourselves nearer to the end. Readers are immediately catapulted into the quasi-confident first-person narrative – which is almost unwaveringly delivered by our disturbingly permanently-nameless narrator – and astute lovers of the nineteenth-century novels that are du Maurier’s inheritance will here find the tenacity of Jane Eyre herself becoming muddled with the naïveté of Catherine Morland, the bumbling, socially inept protagonist of Austen’s Northanger Abbey . While we’re on the subject of genre-inheritance, I think it would be equally impossible not to regard Max de Winter in his full context as allusions to Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre shadow his every word (and what steamy and dark words they are, I was in love from the first page and willing to believe anything he told me, even if that included that martians inhabited Manderley and made the tea). Du Maurier draws on the aloofness of Darcy, the wit and cheek of Rochester and the brooding violence of Heathcliff to create the menacing, gloomy figure of the Bryonic hero that our narrator so completely falls for.

What du Maurier does achieve is a glorious reinvention of the Gothic. Readers of classics like Frankenstein and Treasure Island will revel in the pervading air of menace that exists in Manderley, shadowy halls delivering bumps and squeaks, surprise servant corridors where you least expect them, rooms untouched since the last Mrs de Winter sat in them, rain coats carrying perfumed scents. Indeed, the word “Manderley” itself seems to have so firmly fixed itself in our cultural consciousness that we are able to recall it mythic surrounds as quickly as we are Pemberley and Thornfield. Lovers of the more recent works of Kate Morton which take place around mysterious locations (The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden) will enjoy discovering the secrets of Manderley and will probably be able to make more Beauty and the Beast allusions when it comes to an entire wing being shut up and dark.

This was a woman’s room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care so that each chair, each vase, each small, infintesimal thing should bee in harmony with one another, and with her own personality. It was as though she who had arranged this room had said: “This I will have, and this, and this,” taking piece by piece from the treasures of Manderley each object that pleased her best, ignoring the second-rate, the mediocre, laying her hand with sure certain instinct only upon the best.

To say that Daphne du Maurier draws on other sources of inspiration for her novel is not, of course, to say that it is not original in its own way. Each character follows their own personal path in their search for identity and the role of women and gender expectations are just as fully explored, demolished and built up again. There is a cast of truly unforgettable supporting characters, which is an achivement in itself and something I love to see in any novel but particularly nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novels because it seems that contemporary novels have a hard time of making them seem like anything other than bit-pieces to show how good the protagonist is (also, Frank stole my heart). Rebecca is also a manifesto, a view of the ever-changing fragility and of the superficial and blatantly surface relationships particularly typical of the 1920s and, curiously, of the 2000s.

In short, Rebecca is a jewel in the crown of twentieth-century literature: it manages to deliver that which what readers crave most and that which they don’t expect, all at the same time. It is recommended for anyone who is sick of formulaic romantic fiction and wants to sit on the edge of their seat clutching their throat for the entire ride.

My top ten list just keeps getting better.

10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés

Go the F**k to Sleep

Written by Adam Mansback / Illustrated by Ricardo Cortés

Review by Elle

Publication Information: Canongate Books Ltd / 16 Jun 2011 / 30 pages

Where I heard about it: On my Children’s Literature course forum at the end of the year, when we were winding down about exams and in the process of trying to find other things to read.

Spoilers: I’ve included some pictures, so if you’d prefer the book to be a surprise, don’t look!

Review:

Picturebooks are curious things. In the world of children’s literature, in fact, the very definition of what exactly constitutes a real picturebook is still very much up for debate. Is a picturebook a book wherein the pictures simply compliment the words on the page or is this merely an illustrated book? Should a picturebook – all one word! – be a book wherein the individual pictures and the individual words tell stories which could just as easily be ‘read’ independently from each other or is this too far reaching and sophisticated for the genre? The fact is, the picturebook (or picture book, or illustrated book) is a contentious issue in the world of children’s publishing and Go the F**k to Sleep is the literary equivalent of putting the cat amongst the pigeons but this time the pigeons are filled with dynamite and set to explode on first contact.

As I’ve mentioned, I first heard about Go the F**k to Sleep on my Children’s Literature forum as part of my Open University course. We are a varied bunch, some of us appearing from literary backgrounds, others from child practitioner routes, so views are always fairly diverse but I can’t say I was terribly surprised at the initial reactions to Go the F**k to Sleep. The announcement of the book’s publication initially raised some amusement, then some disbelief, following onto some uncomfortable laughter… and finally the expected slew of derision, anger and denouncement. Why on earth did anyone find swearing funny? Why would anyone think that this was an appropriate thing for a parent to own in a home with a child? Surely, the cry went up, this is low brow humour at the very least! Shockingly enough (oh, the sarcasm), when those of us who found Go the F**k to Sleep a hilarious concept pushed the issue further we hit that seemingly inevitable stumbling block of the fallacy of “preserving” the picturebook genre for children and all of the usual old tosh that resurfaces as a result of people’s ability to think outside of the box.

The unfortunate truth about picturebooks for people who believe in “preserving the joy for the children” is that they have been, and shall always be, just as much for the adult’s enjoyment as for the child’s and the sooner that people realise that the satirical element which they find in picturebooks isn’t there by accident, the better. Though a child might enjoy the bright illustrations of Colin Thompson’s How To Live Forever and the whimsy of houses made of books, I sincerely doubt that they’re going to feast upon the literary quips made on the spines of the tomes, nor do I think that they will really appreciate subtitles such as Immortality for Beginners. Similarly, am I of the opinion that a child will enjoy Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park for its huge, colourful illustrations of monkeys in the park? Absolutely. Do I think that they will understand the biting social narrative contained within? Hardly. And so, dear readers, I present to you Go the F**k to Sleep, otherwise known as: the Practical Alternative To Adults Pretending To Be Grown-up.

Adam Mansbach has taken what can only be described as the tormented parents’ battle cry and has transformed it into a book which can only aid in helping leagues of traumatised-and-sleep-deprived people to feel human and, most importantly, serves the ever important purpose of proving to them that they are not alone in occasionally asking the Ceiling Deity with a lolling head and rolled back eyes what the hell they thought they were doing with all this procreation lark and who told them that it was a good idea? Richly illustrated by Ricardo Cortés’ semi-surrealist toddler dreamscapes and full of coy children with the practiced smile of true torture-merchants, Go the F**ck to Sleep is one part whimsy, one part a chair to the temple.

Adapting the form of the rhyme scheme found in typically repetitive children’s verse, Mansbach’s picturebook delivers quatrains armed with razor blades as he tells the tale of a parent grown increasingly frustrated with their children’s apparent ability to bend the laws of time and physics and their inevitable abandonment of all self-worth and respect in the face of being thwarted by a naked toddler making off down the hallway while they find themselves left in the dark hole of self-loathing coupled with a savage case of utter inability to care. The book speaks both to the frustrated parent, to the teenager who has grown out of such lowly behaviour (they don’t ask to stay up, they just do!) and to the non-parent who looks on, nodding knowingly, absolutely aware that they have dodged the bullet.

Go the F**k to Sleep is a triumph. I applaud you, Mr Mansbach, and the courage you showed flying in the face of adversity and admitting that, after all, parents are fucking human, too.

The cubs and the lions are snoring,

Wrapped in a big snuggle heap.

How come you can do all this other great shit

But you can’t lie the fuck down and sleep?

Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman

When God Was A Rabbit

by Sarah Winman

Review by Elle

Publication Information: Headline Review / 12 May 2011 / 352 pages

Format: Kindle, I was looking for an immediate book fix and the cover for this one is not terribly inspiring.

Genre: Contemporary literature

Where I heard about it: Anna (thatswedishgirl) made me do it! I had seen the cover on a preorder list somewhere and not paid it much attention but when I asked Twitter what book I should buy omgrightnow, Anna insisted (no really, she did, with capital letters and everything).

Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.

Review:

Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, this is the story of a fabulous but flawed family and the slew of ordinary and extraordinary incidents that shape their everyday lives. It is a story about childhood and growing up, loss of innocence, eccentricity, familial ties and friendships, love and life. Stripped down to its bare bones, it’s about the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister.

When I first read the blurb for When God Was A Rabbit, I was a little confused as to why it was so very sparse. No real hint about the characters, no real hint about what which plotty-type events were to aid them in all of that supposed “loss of innocence”… Then I read the book and I realised how little it was possible to really say without letting the magic of the narrative completely evaporate. Half of the joy of this novel is not precisely knowing where it’s going but being so completely consumed in getting there. Part of this magic, I think, comes from the fact that the novel begins in 1968 and almost perfectly captures the mood of the hazy yellow glow that fell over England in those years. Our narrator, Elly, quickly lets us know the manner in which she arrived in the world and then leads us by the hand as she sinks into the rosy afterglow of the sixties and a carefree childhood. Until, of course, she doesn’t.

Only once did I see a boyfriend. I’d gone upstairs to use the toilet and, being alone and inquisitive, I crept into Mrs Penny’s room, which was warm and musty with a large mirror at the foot of the bed. I saw his back only. A naked lump of a back that was as uncouth in sleep as it probably was in wakefulness. Even the mirror didn’t reveal his face, it only revealed mine as I stood hypnotised by the wall to my left, where Mrs Penny had written in lipstick ‘I am me’ over and over again, until the multicoloured cursive shapes merged into a tangled mess of expression that hauntingly aid, ‘Am I me’.

When God Was A Rabbit personifies the beauty that it is possible to achieve in prose without hitting the reader over the head with overwrought language and meaningless minutiae. Every single detail in Winman’s novel is important, every word delivers a little blow, no space is wasted and every line of dialogue is necessary. It is a huge novelty to me, as a reader, to find myself wowed with the beauty of an author’s prose as I am intensely sensitive to overly long “telling” paragraphs that seem sometimes unavoidable.

At the age of seventeen Nancy joined a radical theatre group and travelled around the country in an old van, performing improvised plays in the pubs and clubs. Theatre was her first love, she used to say on chat shows, and we would huddle round the television and burst into laughter and shout, ‘Liar!’ because we all knew that it was Katherine Hepburn who was really her first love. Not the Katharine Hepburn, but a world-weary heavy-set stage manager who declared unencumbered love to her after a performance of their uncompromising two-act play, To Hell and Back and That’s OK.

Without giving too much away, When God Was A Rabbit visits themes of abuse, bereavement, domestic violence and the seemingly smaller instances of shared, mutual worlds built up of the intricate lies that years as a family create. Winman reminds me of an early George Eliot and her tour de force world of Middlemarch with its ‘web of affinities’ and the inescapable ties that bind apparently unrelated people’s fates together by virtue of unavoidable circumstance and the random events that comprise life. When God Was A Rabbit is Winman’s tour de force and it deserves a place on the shelves of any readers who have the twenty-four straight hours required to escape into this novel and the twenty-four days necessary afterwards to reflect on all of the tiny connections that make you sit up and say, “Oh!” upon putting it down.

‘Yes, well, now it’s complicated; he’s prayed for this and he’s been answered and a door has opened for your father, and to walk through that door he knows he’ll have to give something up.’

‘What will be have to give up?’ I asked, wondering if it might be us.

‘The image of himself as a bad man,’ said my mother.

In short, When God Was A Rabbit, Elly’s journey and her family’s shared tumble down the rabbit hole of impossibilities that are our list of wants and needs and wishes as human beings is utterly unmissable. So don’t miss it. Read it right now.

Why are you still here?

10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta

Review by Elle

 

Publication Information: Puffin Books / 6 May 2004 / 256 pages

Format: Used paperback copy. I don’t mind used books but this one makes me sad. I thought it was out of print but it turns out that’s only over here. The US has nice shiny new ones.

Where I heard about it: Who hasn’t heard about it? What prompted me, however, was the release of The Piper’s Son which is the sequel. Review for that one coming soon.

Spoilers: Nothing more than you’d get at Amazon.

 

 

Review:

Francesca’s mum has high expectations. And Frankie never seems to quite live up to them. Since she started at her new school (seven hundred and fifty boys and thirty girls), the pressure feels even greater.

She must be INDIVIDUAL.

She must be TRUE TO HERSELF.

She must not DISAPPOINT HER MOTHER.

Then her mum falls ill. Frankie falls in love. And her family falls apart. What can save Francesca from hitting rock bottom?

 

I’m going to start by saying that this is possibly the best YA novel I have ever read. Yup, that’s right, this is a completely biased, wholly one-sided review. You heard it here first. From here on in, expect nothing but helpless flailing and incoherent squeals of joy.

Saving Francesca has all of the ingredients that I love in a young adult novel, like Ms Marchetta sat down with an Elle grocery list and wrote to order. It has an unreliable narrator who happens to be female and completely kick-ass and yet unbelievably broken all at the same time, it has a lot of realistic school setting with all of the little dramas that occur there perfectly woven into the plot, it has a secondary cast of characters which aren’t secondary and somehow all manage to be fully fleshed out individuals who are mostly free from any kind of secondary character genre tropes.

In short, Marchetta for the win, people!

 

Tara Finke nudges me. ‘Facism at its best here. They train them young.’

I ignore her. My theory is to lay low, and my reluctance to get involved has nothing to do with fear or shyness, contrary to popular perception. I have this belief that people hate change and, more than anything else, they hate those who try to change things. I might not be interested in being in the most popular group in school, but I’m interested in not being an outcast. Anyway, my being political would make Mia happy and I wouldn’t want that. She thinks she knows who I am because she thinks who I am is who she tells me I am.

 

The plot of Saving Francesca is deceptively simple. Francesca’s mother has a breakdown (catalyst unknown to Frankie) and the impacts of it reverberate through Francesca’s whole life. It’s really hard to try to sum up all of the little things that make this plot so perfect without giving away glaring spoilers but I will say that the way the tentacles of sickness weave themselves into Francesca’s every day life, her relationship with her friends, her identity as a person and how she interacts with the rest of her family made me cry and laugh and stare in shock, often all on the same page. Ms Marchetta has managed to capture how one thing can take over someone’s entire life until the only thing that you’re left with is lots of little pieces that don’t make sense.

 

Later, my dad picks us up from Nonna’s and Zia Teresa’s and takes us home for the afternoon. We lie on their bed and my mum is holding us so tight that I can’t breathe. She holds us and she’s crying and she says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ over and over again until I can’t bear to hear the sound of those words.

And I want to tell her everything. About Thomas Mackee the slob and Tara Finke the fanatic and Justine Kalinsky the loser and Siobhan Sullivan the slut. And I want to tell her about William Trombal and how my heart beat fast when he looked at me, but more than anything, I want to say to her that I’ve forgotten my name and the sound of my voice and that she can’t spend our whole lives being so vocal and then shut down this way. If I had to work out the person I speak to most in a day, it’s Mia, and that’s what I’m missing.

 

Francesca herself is delightfully complicated. Wrenched from the security of her girlfriends at her last school and plopped into an all-boys school which has only recently started admitting girls, Francesca finds herself surrounded by the “losers” from her last school and a group of guys who burp in her ear and release genuine, grade-A fart bombs from their behinds whenever she sees them. Unused to being alone, Frankie’s strategy is to not engage but she swiftly finds that this is not an option.

I loved the layering of the old friendships fading away and being exposed in light of the new ones and I loved that Francesca could be wrong and yet compassionate and completely shocked with herself all in one go. I love the way her opinion was slowly reformed, I loved her completely off the wall friendship with Jimmy, I loved the way that she started to see the world for what it really was and it made her realise who she’d been all along.

 

‘Don’t tell William Trombal,’ Thomas Mackee says, ‘He’ll probably try and comfort you and tonight when he was speaking to you, he got a hard-on.’

The others are disgusted, their voices all mingling into one.

‘You’re such a dickhead!’

‘Why can’t you act human?’

‘You are so insensitive.’

‘You’ve made her cry, you arsehole, she’s shaking.’

But I’m shaking because I’m laughing so much. I’m laughing so much that I have tears streaming down my face and then I’m sobbing until it’s like I’m going to choke and I’m feeling so many things that I don’t think my mind can handle it. I can hardly breathe and it must sound so frightening that Thomas Mackee grabs me and holds me and everyone’s saying, ‘It’s okay, Francesca, it’s okay,’ and they’re crying, too.

 

More than anything, I loved Marchetta’s style. She is truly, authentically Australian and she pulls no punches and makes no apologies for it. I loved the atmosphere of the novel and the descriptions of the little sights and sounds of normal life. There were no awkward chunky paragraphs of setting the scene or trying to make us understand where the bus goes on its daily route. There were just the tiny details of everyday life that weaved in and made me feel inescapably at home.

In short, I am so mad I can’t read The Piper’s Son until I’ve finished all this work backlog! Meh!

 

10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here).

Review: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

Review by Kate

 

Publication Information: Speak (Penguin Group) / 1978 / 192 pages

Format: Paperback. Or rather, I should say, my fourth copy of the paperback?

Genre: YA (technically “middle grades”, meant for readers 7-12), crime, mystery, thriller.

Where I heard about it: In 3rd grade, while my gifted class read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 4th graders were reading The Westing Game.  I, as only a nine-year-old can, became obsessed with the book, but my teacher told me I couldn’t read it because we’d be reading it next year… and then she changed the curriculum on us.  I ended up borrowing a copy from the classroom shelves and devouring it.  That was 17 years ago.

Spoilers: A bit more than you’ll find on the book jacket, but less than you’ll find on Wikipedia.

 

Review:

A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will.  And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger – and a possible murderer – to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure: Sam Westing may be dead… but that won’t stop him from playing one last game!

 

I am, as a rule, not a re-reader.  There are no more than a dozen books that I’ve read multiple times, and I can name almost all of them off the top of my head: Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library…  The list goes on.  I like my stories complete, finished, and filed away in my mind where they can safely stay the way I remember them.  There’s none of the ugliness that comes from meeting an old friend ten years later and discovering he’s developed a beer belly and a receding hairline.  I cherish my books that way.

But not The Westing Game.  The Westing Game is a book that I read at ten.  And at fifteen.  And at twenty.  And at twenty-two.  And, and, and.

 

Whoever, whatever else he was, Barney Northrup was a good salesman.  In one day he had rented all of Sunset Towers to the people whose names were already pretended on the mailboxes in an alcove off the lobby.

Who were these people, these specially selected tenants?  They were mothers and fathers and children.  A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge.  And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.  Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

 

Ellen Raskin was an illustrator until the last eight years of her life and The Westing Game was her final (and most acclaimed) book.  It tells the story of sixteen strangers who are all invited to live in an all-new, exclusive apartment building…  And who are all drawn into the mystery of eccentric paper-goods giant Sam Westing.  When Westing dies suddenly, all sixteen residents of Sunset Towers are invited to the reading of his last will and testament and told that his fortune will go to the one who finds the answer.  To what, no one quite knows.  The whole story revolves mostly around Turtle Wexler, the shin-kicking, braid-wearing, mostly-forgotten resident of apartment 3D.  Turtle discovers the body.  Turtle, more than anyone else, wants to solve the mystery.  Or maybe, Turtle just wants to be noticed.

 

“Hey, look!  There’s smoke coming from the Westing house!”  Again, Turtle was late with the news.

“Oh, it’s you.”  Mrs. Wexler always seemed surprised to see her other daughter, so unlike golden-haired, angel-faced Angela.

Flora Baumbach, about to rise with the found pin, quickly sank down again to protect her sore shin in the shag carpeting.  She had pulled Turtle’s braid in the lobby yesterday.

 

To the uninitiated, then, The Westing Game sounds like a typical pre-teen mystery.  And admittedly, elements of it are.  But more than that, it’s a novel about sixteen people, their lives, and the way one crazy stranger draws them all together – for better, for worse, and maybe for better again.

It’s hard to describe to someone who’s not read this book exactly how human all the different characters are.  From Turtle to her pretty sister Angela, from good-guy Theo and his disabled (but also very able) brother Chris, from Doctor Denton Deere to recently-immigrated Mrs. Hoo, everyone has secret depths that slowly reveal themselves in the book’s 200-ish pages.  I cannot name a single character, from the doorman to the dressmaker and back again, who doesn’t evolve in the course of the story.  And I dare you to finish the book without loving every last one.

 

“Perhaps my fiancé can help.”  Angela bit her lip.  Theo was not asking for charity.  And fiancé, what an old-fashioned, silly word.  “I went to college for a year.  I wanted to be a doctor, but, well, we don’t have as much money as my mother pretends.  Dad said he could manage if that’s what I really wanted, but my mother said it was too difficult for a woman to get into medical school.”  Why was she gabbing like this?

“I want to be a writer,” Theo said.  That really sounded like kid stuff.  “Would you go back to college if you won the inheritance?”

Angela looked down.  It was a question she did not want to answer.  Or could not answer.

 

I lose my patience with a lot of modern literature, especially YA, because of its insistence on being contemporary.  So many books are so clogged with pop culture references, they essentially have a two-year shelf life.  I can’t imagine my children reading the books I grew up with because they’ll have no frame of reference.  The Babysitter’s Club books were written when some telephone exchanges were still represented by letters instead of numbers.  The Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike thrillers I inhaled are products of the pre-laptop, pre-internet, pre-cell phone world.

Raskin – maybe on purpose, maybe just out of sheer luck – managed to create a book so timeless, it takes my breath away.  I forget when reading that this story is older than I am, and that entire generations of pre-teens have grown up with Turtle. Her style (Raskin’s, not Turtle’s!) is simple and elegant, descriptive without being overwrought, and every plot point is perfectly placed.  There’s no dragging in the middle or beating you to death with the climax; instead, every last detail is placed with surgical precision, but still feels totally natural.

And even though it’s not meant to be a thriller, its that ease that spurs you on and keeps you glued to the page.

 

“He looked too peaceful to have been murdered,” Turtle said.  She sneezed and Sandy handed her a Westing tissue.

“How would you know?” Doug replied.  “How many people have you seen murdered?”

“Turtle’s right,” her friend Sandy said.  “If Westing expected it, he’d have seen it coming.  His face would have looked scared.”

“Maybe he didn’t see it coming,” Theo argued.  “The killer was very cunning, Westing said.”

 

When I was moving from Arizona to Kansas this past summer, the one book I made sure to take with me in the car was The Westing Game.  Somewhere past Denver, where the road flattened out into bare green, I pulled the book out of my bag.  My whole life was up in the air – I was moving to a new state, I was six weeks from starting law school, my cat was dying – but this book that I discovered when I was nine, it was with me.  I read it straight through, barely speaking to my mother while she drove, and when I cried at the end, they were different tears than the last half-dozen times I’d cried at the same lines.

You know, Elle made a comment in her Liars and Saints review about books coming at the right time in your life, and I think there’s a truth to that.  It can’t be the absolute truth, though, and The Westing Game is the reason why.  I’ve destroyed three copies of the book and this evening, before writing this review, went and purchased my fourth, a pristine, unopened version to sit with pride of place until I read it again.

Instead of there being a time in my life for this book, it is more that this book is just part of my life.

Full-stop.

 

Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons:
The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: Junk by Melvin Burgess

Junk by Melvin Burgess

Review by Elle

Publication Information: Puffin / 6 Feb 2003 / 336 pages

Format: Paperback reprint. Junk was originally published in 1996 and is a 1996 Carnegie Medal winner.

Genre: Contemporary Young Adult

Where I heard about it: I read this as part of my Open University Children’s Literature course for my ongoing Lit degree.

Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.

 

 

Review:

Tar loves Gemma, but Gemma doesn’t want to be tied down—not to anyone or anything. Gemma wants to fly. But no one can fly forever. One day, somehow, finally, you have to come down.

 

I’m not sure why I’ve been so reluctant to talk about this book. I’ve had the header information ready to go for days and days and yet when I sit down to actually write, I find that my fingers have turned to jelly and every letter I type out is gibberish.

I don’t often find characters in the YA genre who are genuinely beyond any help or intervention. In fact, one of the things that I love about YA fiction (most especially contemporary YA) is that there is generally a lingering sense of hope in the narrative. Sometimes this hope is present simply by being something which is inherent in the teenage experience (as a teenager, at the very beginning of everything, there is always a chance things could get better) and sometimes characters will only find hope by going through horrendous hardships beforehand. But, for me, even books about teenage suicide in the YA genre generally leave behind something hopeful for the remaining characters. And just so there are no misunderstandings on this point: I’m not talking about happy endings (if every book I read finished with a happy ending, I’d be one very aggravated Elle) but for me there has to be a sense that it was worth it, that something can be achieved at the end of it. That, even if there wasn’t a point to the suffering, everyone grew and learnt from it.

Junk hit me between the eyes like a sledgehammer because I knew, from the very first chapter, that there was no hope for Tar or Gemma. That, no matter how much they learnt and grew from the experiences they are dragged through, there was an inescapable sense of the inevitable. It was inevitable that they would fall because down was the only direction they had. For that reason, the book (though absolutely excellent) has dragged up a lot of lingering emotions for me and it has stayed with me days after putting it down. I still think about the characters weeks later when I’m zoning out of life and Thinking About Things.

 

Dad used to really hate me doing the housework for some reason, so I used to try and get it all done before he came home. That way he might think she had done it. So Mum left more and more of it to me, and was getting drunk earlier and earlier and I felt guilty because I was giving her less to do. They were having more and more rows and I was getting beat up more and more often…

That’s why I left. The trouble is… she depended on me. See? I kept thinking of the rows they must be having. I kept thinking about how angry he was going to get, how he’d tell her she’d driven me away…

 

For Tar, leaving home is a way to escape the endless abuse of alcoholic parents, who are an excellent double-team consisting of a manipulative mother and a physically abusive father. He is a quiet, sensitive kid who has tried his best to hold his family together and makes excuses for them at every possible turn. After all, his father is a teacher! Why would he have problems at home? For Gemma, however, leaving home is a form of rebellion against all of the rules that her over-cautious parents have set down for her as a direct result of all of the various things that they think is wrong with her. And, oh, there is a lot wrong with her. Gemma is loud, belligerent, selfish and spoiled – the complete antithesis of Tar, who is in turns unsure of himself, friendly to everyone and eager to just have a fair go at life. Gemma is the party animal to Tar’s homebody. In fact, Gemma initially sounds like everything that readers should really recoil from… but not so! Burgess expertly weaves their duelling points-of-view together so carefully and so underhandedly that I loved Gemma as much as I disapproved of her, I wanted her to succeed as much as I wanted her to leave Tar alone and I never once felt like throwing the book away after one of her tantrums.

The plot is an examination of homelessness and heroin addiction but the heart of the book is a terrifying view of how life shapes you without your ever knowing it. Who would have guessed that beautiful, insecure Tar had a dangerously destructive addictive personality and who would have thought that Gemma could ever be the voice of reason? As the book picks up speed, other people’s points-of-view are woven into the narrative and we are able to see Gemma and Tar’s downward spiral through the eyes of their friends, acquaintances and randoms they bump into along the way. Burgess integrates these interludes seamlessly and I never once felt further away from the main characters for them. As we are introduced to the hypnotically self-assured Lily, who is like an addition in herself, and the optimistic anarchist Richard, someone who has no idea how much of a part he’ll play in his friends’ determination to chase the dragon, we start to realise that things are not all as they seem and that perhaps Tar and Lily are not who they think they are.

 

She had this black string vest on. That was it. It took a while to sink in.  At first glance you saw this vest, it was just clothes. And then suddenly your eyes went POP, right through it, and there she was, bare as a baby. But some baby. I mean, you could see everything. It was quite long for a vest but even so when she bent over to put on a new cassette you could see her bare bum.

Everyone was watching her but it wasn’t because she was more or less naked. She had the power. People were talking about this and that but they were all just pretending. She was everything that was going on in that room.

 

Above all, this book is about perception. It is about how you see yourself and how others see you. It is told through pages of broken loves stories. It is the desperation to be far away from yourself without the means to do it. I defy anyone not to see parts of themselves in this book. Gemma and Tar’s experiences, though polar opposites from each other, are representations first and foremost of the teenage experience and what happens when there’s no one there to care. The book made me think about myself and made me ask questions I’d perhaps been avoiding answering. It was powerful and painful and perfect.

 

A month ago, I could have done it, but not now. A month ago I didn’t love her. I didn’t care about anyone – my parents or my friends or Gemma; I didn’t feel anything any more. I thought it was me being on top of things, I thought not feeling anything was better. It was junk. The feelings are there, all right. I was just so smacked out I couldn’t feel the feelings.

 

There’s been a lot of talk recently (a lot of really, really good discussions) about what is appropriate for young adult readers to have in their literature. But I genuinely, whole-heartedly believe that every teenager should read a copy of this book.

It could very well save a life.

Dandelion, Tar. Dandelion.

Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)