Amazon.com Review
In
Eating the Cheshire Cat, three little girls are born into the rigorous tradition of Southern womanhood, with all its standards of grace, beauty, and cutthroat competitiveness. Sarina, mean from birth and pretty as love, has the best chance of achieving Southern queenhood. Bitty Jack and Nicole are the two girls she leaves in her perfumed wake in this novel of friendship gone sour. Sweet-natured Bitty Jack attends summer camp with Sarina, who accuses Bitty Jack's father, the camp handyman, of being a pervert and ruins his life. Bitty Jack quietly nurtures a grudge. Nicole, meanwhile, suffers a frenzied obsession with Sarina throughout their adolescence and college years, an obsession that results in uniquely macabre expressions of love.
Helen Ellis's first novel tries to walk with its two feet simultaneously in three different territories, and if that sounds a little uncomfortable, well, it is. Eating the Cheshire Cat plays at the Southern Gothic surreal: Bitty Jack's first love affair is with a circus freak and the novel ends in an unsurprising sororal bloodbath. But it also toys with the comic: Sarina hatches elaborate plans to cover her reputation-building lies. And, at its best, it casts a cold, even a sociological, eye on the doings of Southern American princesses: Ellis describes the pledging of the Tri Delt sorority in loving detail. If, for instance, a girl doesn't make the Tuscaloosa chapter, she could "rush Auburn two weeks later. Maybe the girl would make Tri Delt there. But everyone knew that wasn't as good. It was an agricultural college, for crying out loud. At the Alabama-Auburn football games, those girls were known as Delta Dogs." It's a relief when Ellis lets her cattiness run wild--and doesn't goop it up with fake gore. --Claire Dederer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This debut novel knocks down Southern stereotypes, literally and figuratively, with its updated version of the pretty, ambitious belle who wreaks havoc all around her. Sarina Summers, a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Carrie, is an almost picture-perfect teenager except for her crooked pinkies. In a dramatic opening scene, Sarina's mother smashes the offending digits after her daughter's Sweet Sixteen luau party, and then drives her to the hospital to have them reset. Mother and daughter are two of a kind: whatever Sarina learns from her mother, she implements 10-fold. She already has her claws in troubled, self-mutilating Nicole Hicks, the girl next door. Nicole's mother, Mrs. Hicks, was a victim of Sarina's mother's sorority tricks, and she tries to train Nicole to compete with Sarina, but Nicole is all too happy to be Sarina's devoted sidekick. Sarina can't charm everyone, though. At Camp Chickasaw, she wins the undying hatred of scrawny Bitty Jack Carlson, when she wriggles her way out of an embarrassing moment by falsely accusing Bitty Jack's janitor father of molestation. Ellis tracks the fortunes of all three girls from their first discovery of sexual longing to the novel's explosive climax, which coincides with Sarina's crowning as homecoming queen of the University of Alabama. Using her disturbing tale to dissect female obsession with beauty, acceptance, friendship and sex, Ellis displays substantial insight into the nuances of Southern living, social climbing and mother and daughter relationships. But it is her deliciously catty humor and breathless storytelling that turn the Alabama of this Southern gothic satire into a chillingly funny Wonderland, complete with three desperate Alices. Agent, Chris Calhoun. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
