Review by Booklist Review
Is there a difference between secrets and lies? Not for Jennifer, the narrator-protagonist of this coming-of-age novel. A self-proclaimed outsider, although not by choice, she revels in solitary adventures and enjoys her own company. But she detests public solitude, which she sees as exclusion from the popular crowd. And Jennifer craves ordinariness. She wants her family and her life to be like those of others around her, and they're not. She has always felt different, and a revelation about her family's past confirms that she is. The truth is a shock, but it explains some things she had either not understood or previously questioned. At first she shields herself ("Everything was all right as long as I could keep edges around what I was feeling"). But slowly she considers the truth and adjusts to it. How she finally incorporates the truth into her life is also how she learns from her experience in this sensitive, well-told story about how children become adults. (Reviewed Feb 15, 1993)0689121628Lindsay Throm
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dangerous secrets and sinister undertones power this uncommon coming-of-age tale. Writing with authority about adolescent insecurity, British author Glaister ( Honour Thy Father ) invests her theme with dramatic resonance, giving her slightly misfit antiheroine some responsibility for a final tragic event. When introduced, 12-year-old Jennifer is preoccupied with digging a tunnel in the garden of her English hometown. She imagines digging straight through to Australia, and thus escaping the dull life she leads with Mama and Bob. Soon after Jennifer commences this project in distancing, Mama drops a bombshell: Jennifer is not their daughter but their grandchild, born to their since-banished daughter. This announcement increases Jennifer's sense of alienation; she begins spending her free time in an abandoned church with a squatter named Johnny. More intrigued than frightened by Johnny's erratic disposition, Jennifer overlooks his possible role in the disappearances of local girls. But then her fantasies and ostensibly innocent lies take on some real consequences, which she must face. Glaister is a shrewd observer of domestic minutiae as well as emotional nuances. A masterful play of dark foreshadowing, the novel grips the reader's emotions as it moves to a haunting conclusion. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The day Jennifer turned 13, she was told that the people she thought were her parents were really her grandparents. Furthermore, she had been born in November, not in June, as she had always believed. As she struggles to adjust her worldview, Jennifer turns on her grandparents. She discovers the power of lies and begins to use this power to her own ends. Eventually, she learns that real harm can result from a careless lie, and her life is changed forever. Glaister's third novel (following Honour Thy Father , LJ 5/1/91) is poignant and observant, capturing the confusion of adolescence and mixing bizarre elements with everyday life. The author leads the reader through a maze of images, resolving the conflicts she creates with skill and elegance. Recommended for public libraries.-- Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island, Coll . of Continuing Education Lib ., Kingston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In her increasingly interesting work, this English author has intuited some uncomfortable truths about the ``outsider's'' pursuit of the ``ordinary'' (in Honour Thy Father, 1991, a gothicy creeper, as well as in Trick or Treat, 1992). Here, within the pulsing psyche of an adolescent girl--fenced apart, she feels, from the world of her peers--eerie joys and sudden cruelty pierce in and out, and phantoms roam. ``Ordinariness was all that I had ever craved,'' says 12-year- old Jennifer, who can hardly invite anyone over. Bob insists on not wearing clothes (he and Mama are old ``leftists''), TV isn't allowed (gamma rays), and the two are just ``old.'' One day Jennifer decides to dig down to Australia (``the game of a lonely girl''), and, lured by a starving cat instead of a rabbit, she finds a way to a deserted cemetery, a decaying playground, an unholy church sans pews and altar, and then to ``Johnny''--the ferret-faced whistler, working hard with old wood on ``something.'' Like Alice, Jennifer shrinks and expands in perception--the new and exotic loom large, and at home her ``parents'' confess to a lie so terrible that she wants ``to pay them back.'' But later, watching the foolish old couple, she still wants to go back to childhood and certainty, the time before she knew ``the greyness that lay behind everything.'' Armed with the tale of the lumpy, unlikable girl Bronwyn, lipstick, cigarettes, and the tantalizing, bewildering, sexually exciting, dangerous Johnny, ``My life was opening up. Like some exotic flower.'' At the close, Jennifer performs a terrible exorcism. Lies, guilt (``never simple or innocent''), and cruelty flicker on the edge of an adolescent's crazily wavering view of her world and herself--in this mesmerizing tale, again bright with shards of humor, corrosive observation and potent landscapes. A shrewd, efficient, invasive novel--first-rate.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
