Review by Booklist Review
The child of The Liars' Club (1995) recaptures her teenage years, starting with her leaving home at 17 in 1972, taking off from her tiny Texas town with a handful of boys and a beat-up truck heading for Los Angeles. That prologue then spirals back to earlier days in high school. Mary is dazed and confused by her lethargy in the face of her friends' needs and by her own inchoate desires, usually drowned in cheap drugs and kisses. Her friends Clarice and Meredith have heft and breadth on these pages, more so than the boys who wander through, but the true landscape is not that of friendship or lust or even Texas; it's the landscape of Mary's own thoughts. The plodding dullness of adolescent existence is punctuated by slivers and flashes of blinding illumination^-indeed, Karr uses metaphors of light like carving knives. The fevered need of teens to do things that are bad for them, over and over, lies twinned at the heart of this fiercely recalled memoir, alongside a slippery, cloudy, thick delineation of desire. Few people have written so luxuriantly about kissing as Karr, or what kissing could be and do all by itself. She allows us glimpses of what happened later to these people, in small doses, just enough to remind us what memory and time can do. ^-GraceAnne A. DeCandido
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers seduced by Karr's canny memoir of a childhood spent under the spell of a volatile, defiantly loving family in the Liar's Club can look forward to more exquisite writing in this sequel focusing on her adolescence in a dusty Texas town. Karr struggles as the talented child of a sullen, dismissive father and an ethereal, unstable mother who studies art and disappears from time to time, functioning more as an ally than as a mother to young Mary, who she encourages to be sexually active. When Mary is locked up in a drug raid, her mother rescues her by charming the judge, an old admirer. Writing in the second person, Karr recounts with disarming immediacy her tenuous childhood friendships, her rocky move into adolescence and sexual experimentation (she describes teenage kisses as "delicate as origami in their folds and bendings"); her troubles with school authority and her early escape into books and language. In one funny and poignant episode, Mary despairs over her dysfunctional family life in a dull town and, influence by the literature she is reading, makes a half-hearted attempt at suicide, before she resolves to live "as long as there are plums to eat and somebody - anybody who gives enough of a damn to haul them for you." Moving effortlessly from breathtaking to heart stabbing to laugh out loud raucous, the precision and sheer beauty of Karr's writing remains astounding. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fans of Karr's award-winning The Liars' Club (1995) will not be disappointed by this feisty, funny, and tender memoir of a drug-ridden coming of age in Leechfield, her Texas hometown. The author's much-married mother, bemused father, and angry sister Lecia are all still in place; new characters include surfers who nod out at the beach every weekend, the sweet college boy who was her first lover, and a bouquet of remarkable girlfriends, unlikely blooms among Leechfield's insular population. Karr's strange family has pushed her to the social outskirts, and she buries herself in books and fantasies. But they don't stave off prepubescent self-consciousness, like the terrible shame of the huge pimple on her forehead exposed to her sixth-grade crush, or the pain when her best friend moves on to another best friend, or the humiliation that her first real date is with the town's ranking dweeb, who is also a proselytizing Mormon. Karr vividly captures those moments that are so important to a girl growing up, and explains why they are important. She candidly depicts a muffed eighth-grade suicide attempt and high-school years passed in a blur of drugs (the time is the late 1960s and early '70s) as she tried to escape the paralyzing monotony and psychic brutality of life in Leechfield. Accelerating substance abuse leads to arrest and a horrendous, acid-laced night at Effie's Go-Go bar, whose terrifying patrons inspire Karr to one of those chemically assisted moments of revelation: "There's no place like home." She leaves home soon enough, however, bound for California, where her new life as drug-free poet and writer will soon begin. Energized by Karr's sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. More importantly, her clear-eyed recollection of what it's like to change from child into woman resonates with truth. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
