No matter how hard she tries, Ellen Burns will never be Scarlett O'Hara. As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution Of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, ISBN 0811212351
Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell". But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here. With the off-handed knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs to win the affections of the apparently perfect new girl, Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling energy. Now translated into six languages, I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks' consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement's Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally over-blown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend...
Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, ISBN 0811212351
Girl bedroom furniture > Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, ISBN 0811212351
The Voices
A story of incantatory beauty set in the wilds of Australia, Susan Elderkin's second novel The Voices has earned her the distinction from Granta as one of the Best Young British Writers Under 40. In the remote, blood red dust of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint turns to the stark landscape and mesmerizing spirits of the native Aborigines for the companionship he lacks at home. When he is befriended by Maisie, an enigmatic Aboriginal girl who has "sung him up," he slowly comes to realize that he is meddling with powers far beyond his control. Ten years later, Billy lies in a hospital bed, recovering from gruesome wounds of mysterious origin. Shifting between his hospital stay and the childhood that led him there, The Voices unfolds into a haunting exploration of the relationship between a white man, the land he loves, and the native spirits of the country struggling to be heard before they are lost forever.
The Voices
Girl bedroom furniture > The Voices
Stand Tall
Tree is six foot, three and a half inches tall and still growing. He's never really fit in, but with the help of his grandpa and the new girl at school, Tree begins to realize that he can stand tall and be himself, no matter where he is.
Stand Tall
Girl bedroom furniture > Stand Tall