Amazon.com Review
Irini Spanidou's second novel,
Fear, begins in June 1959, and ends one year later. In between, Spanidou chronicles the evolution of young Anna Karystinou during her 13th year. Daughter of an army colonel and his Egyptian-born Greek wife, Anna is used to moving around a lot, but Thessaloniki is different:
In the small villages near outposts where she had lived year after year, the village children came out in force and besieged her. They may have shown hostile curiosity at first, staring at her silently in challenge, but in the end were quick enough to say the first word. In the week since she had lived on this street, these children had treated her with pointed indifference--the once-over dismissive glance that lingers just long enough to jab.
Friendless, at odds with her unhappy mother, and entering into the choppy waters of puberty, Anna is poised for her life "to change once and for all." And when she meets Veronica Koroneou at school, it seems the catalyst has arrived.
Adolescence, a new school, the discord between her parents, and her father's ongoing attempts to mold Anna into an ideal "son" are just a few of the traumas that Spanidou's heroine must face during the course of this novel. Divided into sections such as "Two Days in June," "Three Days in September," "Eleven Days in December," etc., Fear intensifies the experience of growing up by telescoping it into a few short days. And lurking always in the background is "the Dragon," a mysterious serial killer who serves to amplify a young girl's greatest fear: the consequences of being a woman. Spanidou is masterful at evoking the rage, alienation, intense loneliness, and periodic euphoria of adolescent girls. Though set in Greece, this strong tale is universal. --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
The painful psychological complexity of adolescence drives Spanidou's gripping second novel. Anna Karystinou, the heroine of Spanidou's hailed God's Snake (1986), raised by her martinet military father to repress her emotions, has been denied emotional sustenance. An angry, willful girl growing up in late 1950s Greece, she is a harsh judge of her narcissistic parents. Her cold, self-pitying mother looks to Anna "like the pupil of a single, horrifying eye," and her iron-willed, demanding father, who has tried to make Anna into "a real man," now realizes that his daughter hates him. At 13, Anna is bewildered by the emotional swings of adolescence and miserable that the family must move every year when her father is reassigned. When Anna finds temporary refuge with a new friend, Vera, Spanidou fluidly evokes the sexually charged friendship of teenage girls, the frisson of tension as they try to interpret the signals from their bodies and from the outside world. Their normal adolescent impulses are complicated by the fear that grips the city of Thessaloniki as a killer nicknamed the Dragon murders a string of young women. Anna has been trained not to acknowledge fear, but fear of her father, of her sexuality and of the elusive killer permeates her consciousness. Reading Dostoyevski, she perceives the relationship between fear, hatred and love. Surrounded by people who seem to her like enemies but happen to be her parents, her teachers and her friends, it's no wonder that she yearns to know the Dragon. Spanidou's unflinching portrait of a troubled young girl who is developing the steely strength to be a survivor has a brutal honesty. Though there is some overwriting, her impeccable pacing and the pressure of inevitability move the novel to a heart-thumping finale.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
