Customer Reviews

Colony Girl: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved this book. I have worked with adolescents in a variety of settings for 30 years and Mr. Rayfiel captures the struggle of leaving home with terrific insight. Though his young protagonist is from a nontraditional home he captures the universal conflict of separation from family in a way anyone can recognize. He demonstrates in a powerful way that the shape of "family" outside the norm maintains its significant impact and attachment issues. I have seen this over and over in my work with kids from different "family" constellations. Mr. Rayfiel's writing is poignant and heartfelt and the book is beautifully crafted. The story demonstrates the complex issues of growing up that include spirituality, sexual awakening, parental weakness, adult hypocrisy, peer relationships, sexism and narrowmindedness. Eve is definitely the Holden Caufield of the new millenium. This book will be a classic coming-of-age work.

I loved every page. One of the most surprising aspects of this book is how a man can write so insigthtfully and sensitively about the feelings of a young girl. It is truly a coming-of-age story with meaning for men and women of this era in America. The protagonist's reflections on her relationships both inside and outside of her "Colony" have lovely pearls of wisdom for all of us. All of my friends will find this under the Xmas tree this year.

I agree with all of the other positive reviews that this is an entertaining and engrossing story of a girl's summer spent reaching out to explore life outside her religious "Colony." She takes an offbeat job, forms probably unsanctioned relationships in unusual combinations, and stretches and probes her existing relationships with Colony hierarchy, family, and girl friends.

I disagree with other reviewers, though. I could tell immediately the author was male, even though the main character and voice are female. There is definitely a haze covering the story of a man imagining what a girl in this situation would be thinking, and parts of the story seemd less than authentic, because of this.

However, I thought the head Colony honcho, Gordon, was great. He acts out his own skewed but somehow charming theology and thus leads by example. Deciphering his relationship with Eve is one of the skillfully handled challenges this book offers.

All in all, there's plenty of good stuff in this book to make you wish it went on longer.

A critic on National Public Radio said 'Colony Girl' was a gem that had been overlooked by other critics and that hadn't received the acclaim it deserved. He said the male author had done an astonishing job of writing in the voice of a young girl. After I read the book, I gave myself a dope-slap. Why had I trusted a man to tell me that another man wrote convincingly in the voice of a girl?!?! The book is little more than a male fantasy about what discovering sex ought to be like for young girls. The voice is wrong, wrong, wrong. The other critics were right to ignore this book -- and I wish I had.

I was put off this by reading that it was a book about a fifteen year old seductress by an author who is, to judge by the jacket photograph, a long way from being fifteen or seductive or female. (But then again would we think differently about it if he'd used a female pseudonym and a fake photo?)
Another strike against it was that I'd found Rayfiel's last book "Split Levels" poorly constructed. A lot of pretentious stream of consciousness and dream sequences interrupted a moderately good mystery in an irritatingly anonymous suburb.
This is a great improvement, although it still attempts too much and I must agree with other critics that the sex scenes are implausible and intrusive. Aside from her unlikely eroticism Eve is a great character. She is a fatherless girl whose mother has fled from California to Iowa. She takes up with a motherless boy whose father wants to flee from Iowa to California. She lives in a religious commune run by a "charismatic" leader reminiscent in a remarkable number of ways, which may be coincidental (I'm phrasing this tactfully) of the fraudulent guru in Updike's "S."
Rayfiel cleverly exposes the ways religious cults can almost legitimize child molestation by early arranged marriages and political clout. One of the techniques is to persuade the girl that marriage is a short cut from childhood to adult status. I was reminded of Pearl Abraham's "The Romance Reader."
Above all he is a gifted writer. By the end of the book we have a map of Arhat, Iowa, in our heads, and yet he never pauses for long-winded description. He has a seamless ability to make a few words do the work of setting the scene without adjectives and without holding up the action. For example, in one scene Eve feels ill because of working on the highway in the hot sun and gets into the shade of "a sign that listed Arhat's two motels. It was late afternoon. The metal threw a patch of shadow almost to the drainage ditch."

The New York Times review (9/29/99, p.E8--"winning, original and supremely intelligent"; "the reader [will be] delighted and astonished") truly understates how creative, original and surprising this book is. Your children and grandchildren will be reading this book. The Times got it right when it compared it to Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye.

This book is a must read! It is an exciting and intriguingcoming of age novel. A fifteen year old daughter of friends said"I can't believe a man wrote this, he understands what it's like to be a fifteen year old girl so well." Mr. Rayfiel not only creates a realistic character within a truly bizarre plot, he even makes us believe that it is completely natural to fall in love with both a father and his son. I loved this book and recommend it highly to everyone!