She finds a like-minded soul in an Italian student named Petruchio, who, for all his certainty, wraps Mark Rozzo is a contributing writer to Book Review. Juliet Porteus is a veterinary student up from London, where her arty bourgeois family is a bit mystified by her fierce adherence to science. The conundrum of Schrodinger’s cat-a quantum experiment designed to show that opposites can coexist-reverberates throughout this novel about a motley group of flat mates in Glasgow, in which eithers and ors-life and death, truth and lies-pile up like butts in an overflowing undergraduate-house ashtray. Discuss.” Is nothing safe from Handler’s ridicule? Please try to use the word “Columbine” in your answer. Daniel Handler makes an engagingly clueless murderess out of Flan: She’s plagued less by conscience than she is by the schlock theories about her rampage offered up by the likes of broadcast queen Winnie Moprah, and her own version of events is sprinkled, textbook-style, with bold-face vocabulary words and facetious “Study Questions” along the lines of “Everybody keeps getting mad at Flannery, but it’s not her fault. When a freaked-out Flan gets hold of a croquet mallet and a baguette at a drunken party, all hell breaks loose. Despite the fortress-like security of the Basic Eight, Flan begins to experience some pretty harsh real-world stuff: Her truancy is compromising her chances to get into an Ivy, her lecherous bio teacher is getting scarier by the minute and, worst of all, Adam State, the boy she’s not-so-secretly in love with, is showing absolutely no interest in her. In fact, they’re all so staggeringly above average that it’s hard to tell them apart along with Flan, there’s Kate, Jennifer Rose Milton, V, Douglas, Lily, Gabriel and, finally, Natasha, the cool girl who’s everything the fat-obsessed Flan wishes she could be. For Flan, who keeps a detailed journal of the tumultuous year in which she’s eventually labeled a Satanic-cult murderer, life at San Francisco’s soul-numbing Roewer High is all about the Basic Eight-an incestuous clique of precocious friends who resemble the Algonquin Round Table as much as “Dawson’s Creek.” They’re a snipey and privileged set, given to parking their cars in the faculty lot and arguing over the proper way to bake a brie. Just ask Flannery Culp, the teenage heroine and narrator of this venomous debut, which is like a Young Adult novel gone gloriously-and sneeringly-to seed.
0 kommentar(er)
