Jennifer Moss Moss itibaren Brigus, NL, Canada
For my upcoming New Orleans trip, everyone mentioned this as a classic New Orleans novel. But it's old and creaky. Written in a totally different style. And a black Mammy talking in stereotypical New Orleans dialog. For such a fluff novel it took forever to read. It's technically about a murder, but the murder happens in the third chapter, is not really a very interesting crime and then it gets dragged out and not resolved until the final two chapters. The middle just reads like a lot of society fluff. Blah. It took much longer to read than it should have. However, I want to have a drink at Antoine's. Dinner seems expensive.
Eh, it was ok. I guess I am getting old. I am surprised by the content in some of these so called YA novels. This book in particular: smoking, drinking, spending the night with boys, etc. I am not ultra conservative but the characters in this book are like 15. While I know smoking and drinking happens at 15 I don't see that it needs to be glamorized. Times have changed I guess in the few years since I was a teen.
Taken from Amazon.com: Gloeckner's latest, a combination of comics and prose, follows the sexual misadventures and coming-of-age of Minnie Goetze, a troubled teenager very much reminiscent of Gloeckner, as she stumbles toward adulthood in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie's diary details the loss of her virginity to Monroe, her mother's less than devoted boyfriend. She falls in love with him, though he continues to sleep with Minnie's self-absorbed, drunken mother. A hellish adolescence follows: Minnie's kicked out of various schools, has promiscuous sex and ends up on the streets, strung out and obsessed with a young lesbian who pimps her out for more drugs. Gloeckner mined these same experiences in her award-winning graphic novel A Child's Life. In this work, though, Minnie's story is told through a combination of prose, illustrations and comics, capturing the confused inner dialogue of a precocious, attention-starved girl with a talent for drawing. This is both the book's strength and its weakness. Unlike the highly distilled emotions of A Child's Life, the prose descriptions of Minnie's experiences are engaging but formless, bleeding onto the page. The crisp details of Gloeckner's b&w drawings help by grounding the stories in a convincing realism, but they're obviously the product of an older, more judgmental, but also more reflective, self. More affecting are the casual teenage doodlings and comics that Gloeckner includes periodically throughout the book.