ME & EMMA

Name: ME & EMMA
Author: Elizabeth Flock
ISBN: 0-7783-2082-0

by Elizabeth Flock ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2005

Second-novelist Flock (But Inside I’m Screaming, 2003) captures Carrie’s powerlessness and resourcefulness beautifully. The...

bookshelf

A credible and appealing eight-year-old narrates the story of her family’s hardscrabble life.

Carrie Parker lives in Toast, North Carolina, with her mother, her abusive stepfather, Richard, and her younger sister, Emma. Carrie’s narrative has a clear-eyed, unsentimental tone: “The first time Richard hit me I saw stars in front of my eyes just like they do in cartoons.” She learns to stay away from home and to stay out of the way after Richard has been drinking. She and Emma even have his temper calibrated. After his tenth beer he tends to explode, so after the eighth, the two sisters begin a slow retreat to the only safe place in the house, a spot they call “behind-the-couch.” Their mother puts up with Richard’s beatings—she needs the economic support—and urges the girls to behave. When Richard orders Carrie into his bedroom, Emma takes her place, pushing Carrie out and shutting the door. Afterward, Carrie thinks Emma has taken the whipping meant for her, but it’s clear to the adult reader that Emma has been sexually abused. Despite the brutality of her family life, Carrie finds enjoyment in the woods, in her friends and teachers, and in memories of her dead father, who doted on her. Gradual moves down the economic scale—to another town, another job, another rundown shack—put even more pressure on the family. In desperation, Carrie writes a letter inviting her grandmother to visit. But even that fails. When it seems no one is willing to protect these children, an elderly neighbor takes an interest in Carrie. He notes the cuts and bruises inflicted by Richard and teaches her to shoot a rifle. “You got to learn how to defend yourself since no one else’s doing it for you,” he tells her.

Second-novelist Flock (But Inside I’m Screaming, 2003) captures Carrie’s powerlessness and resourcefulness beautifully. The child is so believable, in fact, that the final twist, which brings into question all of Carrie’s perceptions, just doesn’t work. Flawed, then, but tremendously touching.

Pub Date: March 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-7783-2082-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FURIES
by Elizabeth Flock

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA
by Elizabeth Flock

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

bookshelf

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.