The Mare by Mary Gaitskill begins when Velvet, a Dominican girl living in NYC, is eleven and ends when she thirteen, but her life experiences go far beyond her age. Through the Fresh Air Fund, she gets to go to upstate NY for a summer and stays with Ginger (“this blond lady…her face full of niceness with pain around the edges”) and her husband Paul. They live near a ... Read More...
Faithful: A Novel
What do you do with your life when you’re seventeen and thanks to you your best friend is in a permanent vegetative state? If you’re Shelby you give up college, try to kill yourself, spend time in a psychiatric hospital and when released, shave your head. She is a wraith living in her parent’s basement when Alice Hoffman’s Faithful begins. If this sounds off-putting in ... Read More...
Cruel Beautiful World
Sometimes a book’s marketing can end up working against it. I found this to be the case with Caroline Leavitt’s Cruel Beautiful World. The synopsis and various blurbs referenced the Manson murders—a real piece of clickbait and yet, aside from being set in the summer of 1969 and the main protagonist’s worry about being left home alone the novel had nothing to do with ... Read More...
Loner: A Novel
Loner, by Teddy Wayne is a disquieting mix of everything that makes college worth remembering and everything you’d rather forget. David Federman is a high school loner, but he’s not one of the subgroup of computer or science geek elites, he’s just a little odd. What he does have is a way with words, enough so that he’s the only person from his New Jersey school to get ... Read More...
How to Set a Fire and Why
You may be wondering why I am giving you this account. Well, I don’t know really. A bunch of things happened and I’m just putting them in order. I’m doing it for myself. You are just a construction—you’re helping me to put things in order. You are my fictional audience and as such, I appreciate you very much. I figure when I finish, I will throw this out. Lucia Stanford ... Read More...
The Girls
I wanted them to like me. Such a simple sentence. Six words, and yet, coming three-fourths of the way through Emma Cline’s debut novel The Girls, they hold the key to the entire novel. They are instantly recognizable to any woman with a memory of her teenage years and they define fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd, the novel’s narrator. But as simple as they are they are also ... Read More...
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