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THE LITTLE GIRL ON THE ICE FLOE

Name: THE LITTLE GIRL ON THE ICE FLOE
Author: Adélaïde Bon
ISBN: 978-1-60945-515-6

by Adélaïde Bon ; translated by Tina Kover ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2019

Vividly conveys the survivor’s emotions of shame, rage, and fear but also offers—slowly, tentatively—hope for healing.

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Based on the author’s personal experiences, this debut novel traces in harrowing detail the emotional odyssey of a girl who is raped at age 9.

It’s hard to say if this riveting text is a novel in the strictest sense of the word, but the power of the material makes that a minor quibble. Bon captures from the first pages the eerie distancing experienced by a victim of sexual violence. In the aftermath of the assault in the stairwell of her family’s Paris apartment building, weeping Adélaïde can only nod or shake her head as her concerned parents question her. “She's not really there anymore,” a sensation that continues in the police station where she is taken to file a criminal complaint. In the decades that follow, she tries to numb herself with binge-eating, frantic masturbation, alcohol and drugs, but the terrifying, half-submerged memories she calls “jellyfish” won’t leave her alone. Years of psychotherapy help some, but too often in the midst of sessions she finds herself “small and lost and frozen, standing in the middle of a vast white expanse, waiting. She calls this place, my little girl on the ice floe.” The sense of alienation from her own life is made palpable in the interplay throughout the novel between a third-person account of events and the occasional incursion of anguished first-person outbursts. In 2012, when Adélaïde is pregnant with her first child, she learns that a petty thief has been identified from a DNA sample as the serial rapist of dozens, probably hundreds of children over a period of 20 years. The prospect of testifying at his trial finally unlocks Adélaïde’s recollection of the worst moment in her rape, followed by a cogent neurological explanation of why it can take the survivors of violent crimes many years to remember the details of their abuse. The conclusion shows justice only partially served in a society that, in the author’s persuasive depiction, remains sexist and inclined to blame women.

Vividly conveys the survivor’s emotions of shame, rage, and fear but also offers—slowly, tentatively—hope for healing.

Pub Date: March 19, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-60945-515-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.