This is a fucking brilliant love letter to girls and all their power and possibility. It's also an ode to art and music and food and sex and all the tThis is a fucking brilliant love letter to girls and all their power and possibility. It's also an ode to art and music and food and sex and all the things that make life worth living.
I checked this out from the library to read it, but I am now going to buy my very own copy to own and keep on the special shelf of favorite books that's next to my bed. These are the books I want to revisit, even just in part, the ones that I consider friends. This book is one of my dear friends, and I think Johanna/Dolly would appreciate that....more
So I really, really want to write a review of this book to tell you all how good it is and to push you into reading it. But I'm not sure what to say tSo I really, really want to write a review of this book to tell you all how good it is and to push you into reading it. But I'm not sure what to say that would a) in any way match or reflect the book's quality or b) not give anything away. I was drawn in by the combination of the creepy cover and karen's review promising that it was amazing. Neither led me astray. But the book turned out to be more compelling and complex than I'd anticipated and seeing its ideas develop with little foreknowledge of the book's focus or direction was part of the pleasure of reading it. (At the same time, I fully intend to re-read this and expect it to be amazing the second time as well.)
The Uninvited is intriguing and unsettling and thought-provoking. It is beautifully written but not at all overwritten. The narrator - Hesketh, a man with Asperger's and a keen eye for patterns, including social patterns - is keenly felt and thoroughly inhabited. His bafflement by the world in general, much less by the events of the narrative, provides an ideal narrative voice for a story where so many fundamental assumptions and beliefs are challenged.
I was drawn in from the very beginning and found myself completely unable to stop reading until I had finished the book late last night. It's not a pageturner in the traditional sense of being action-packed and the reader needing to know what happens next. It is more deliberate than that. But it is determined. It's such a cliché to say "it grabbed me and wouldn't let go," but it's true here. This is a book that wormed its way into my mind, wiggled around, and appears to have settled in. I woke up this morning thinking about it. ...more
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