Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult...
Blogger, TV writer, “retired derby girl [and] Wonder Killer” Ribon (You Take It from Here, 2013, etc.) provides a contemporary perspective on her younger self’s most intimate teenage longings.
During her adolescent years, the author kept copies of the letters and notes she wrote to the various boys targeted for her affections. Along with her journal entries, those letters—to Thirty-Six Hours Boy, Silent Skateboarder Boy, Homeroom Boy, Nice Boy and Super Mario Brothers Boy—comprise much of the narrative thread, with chapter titles including “I Turned Sixteen and Got Really Horny on April 15th,” “Dear Dorkhouse Forum” and “My Year of Dicks.” Ribon explains her reasoning for retaining these embarrassing missives: “While most of you would probably not find it wise to publish your teenage diaries, it is an effective way to get people off your ass for saving all your shit, along with the bonus of a possible tax deduction once you reach Hoarding Level 3, also know as ‘I’d better rent a storage unit before I end up with a divorce.’ ” If reading through the detritus of Ribon’s adolescent longings is not tiresome enough, the author includes, in bold type, contemporary dissections of her previous copious correspondence and overwrought interior landscape. “The real tragedy is that nobody ever pulled me aside to gently inform me that some feelings I should keep inside, that not everybody deserves my truth,” she writes. “Or at least so much of my truth.” Many readers may agree with that sentiment.
Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult musings. For others, it’s a tedious slog through a year in the life of a teenager who, as the author herself recalled, wrote obsessively, compulsively and constantly.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940207-05-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
