First Fruits [Paperback]

Penelope Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 4, 2002

Kate Carr is the luckiest girl in the world. Everyone at school envies her because her father is such a charmer, the most mesmerising minister in Edinburgh. The clever new girl Lydia envies her most of all. Sometimes Kate wonders what it would be like to have a mother like Lydia's, or even a doting grandmother like stupid Moira's, but she knows what she has is better. She is special; she is Keith Carr's 'first fruit', his only child, his offering. He is training her up in his image, to have It - his special power, the ability to manipulate people. She practices what he's taught her with devastating effect...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lord of the Flies stands as the classic treatment of the cruelty that children can inflict upon one another, but William Golding and his sadistic tribe of stranded English schoolboys probably seem obvious and brutish to Penelope Evans (The Last Girl, Freezing). Where Golding's novel concentrates on encroaching anarchy and a regression to savagery (pig heads on sticks, as every high school sophomore remembers), Evans's First Fruits coolly focuses on the subtleties of strictly regimented adolescent conduct. Butchering pigs seems dull compared to the barbed nuances of classroom seating and sleepover invitations.

Evans's Scottish narrator, Kate Carr, is 14 years old, manipulative, deceitful, and utterly compelling. Her voice is haunted and haunting:

Something about me. People can see I'm special. Something about my eyes, perhaps, out of the ordinary. Something he's put there. That's why you have to remember to smile. Smiling makes the world a better place. It makes people easier to ... deal with. And anyway, why not smile? I've got reason to smile. I'm his daughter. The luckiest girl alive. Except for the one thing.

He is Keith Carr, charismatic evangelist. The "one thing" is Kate's badly burned leg, legacy of an event that Keith, who cannot bear the stigma of spiritual or physical imperfection, will not allow his daughter to remember. The conflict between the rigidity of dogma and the fluidity of memory lies at the heart of the novel, as little by little the extent of Keith's control over his daughter percolates from the depths of the novel to its deceptively placid surface.

Kate's increasing desperation to escape the laserlike intensity of her father's attention is clear. She wonders "what it would be like not to be the one and only. To be invisible. Because attention shared would be attention halved." When she elects to share that attention with her misfit classmates Lydia and Moira, hoping their respective brilliance and opacity will tantalize Keith, she finds herself drawn into a complex web of religion, seduction, memory, and desire that moves her inexorably into the past.

The novel is both powerfully poignant and remarkably restrained. Kate is a creature of suggestion, rather than statement. The narrative hovers around the absence at its center, like a moth around a flame. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In this darkly seductive follow-up to Freezing (1998), Evans positions catty Scottish schoolgirls as unknowing victims of a family's control fetish. Part Lolita-esque twist on the psychological thriller, part straight-ahead mystery, this unusual, intriguing story mystifies throughout. Kate Carr seems to have an edge over the other girls in her class. She is always the one planting the seeds for slumber parties, Greek lessons and flirting with boys; she's the kind of girl who quietly and craftily gets her way without raising a stir. Her father, Minister Keith Carr, is an irresistible sweetheart who has an almost hypnotic ability to befriend his daughter's schoolmates (who, naturally, are green with envy over Kate's enchanting dad). While it's obvious that Kate has no lack of girlfriends, her home life is certainly reclusive. She and her father live alone, save for Keith's cold, barely there motherAa homestead in stark contrast to those of Kate's classmates Lydia and Moira, whose mother and grandmother are openly affectionate and loving. With no drive than to emulate her father, Kate perfects the art of beguiling, in this case shrewdly influencing her "friends." Though seemingly harmless, her power over Lydia, Moira and others is reflective of her father's own power over her. Kate eventually realizes the horror of her father's need to control, and the author's talent for spinning a suspense-filled denouement quickly becomes evident. Raising questions relating to parents' love, commitment and power over others, this intelligent work both challenges and frightens. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: Allison & Busby (July 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0749005432
• ISBN-13: 978-0749005436
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Fruits by Penelope Evans, July 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: First Fruits (Hardcover)

Kate Carr at 14 lives in Scotland with her father, a preacher of the old puritan school. She is a lucky girl, the center of attention. We hope our own children can be like her. Not much scope for a good read here.... Not so.

Penelope Evans brilliantly recreates parallels with our own school day memories. Schools are the same the world over. There are people we recognize and perhaps still know. But no one will comfortably admit to being at this school.

Children can be manipulative and deceitful. Evans does not take the easy option of brutish teenage behaviour. Small pleasant acts can have great significance.

Why is Kate thinking and behaving like this? Somewhere there is a story of a lost past which is tantalizingly close to the surface. It comes with such power the reader is left stunned.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Chilling Story, May 27, 2004

By 

Margaux Paschke - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: First Fruits (Hardcover)

My review doesn't ruin anything for the potential reader: At first glance, the protagonist's (Kate) life seems perfect and the reader assumes her gripes are the usual teenage angst. As you read on you discover the subtle creepy undertone becomes more and more ominous and real. Being the constant center of attention isn't all it's cracked up to be - as Kate shows us. Her fundamentalist preacher father and bitter grandmother are the mak'ins of one scary a** family. Kate's grandmother is especially chilling once you discover what is REALLY going on. The fact that this novelist does not resort to a tabloid description but rather, uses subtle hints and slow reveal of the true nature of this family made it all the more frightening for me. There are so many layers and issues to this story which makes it a true work of art - I consider it a modern masterpiece. The whole novel is a mystery - the circumstances leading to Kate's crippled leg, the mother's disappearance and so on......Nothing is as it appears to be which includes Kate herself. The issues of religion, being a "good mother" or person for that matter, sex, concept of beauty, being part of the "in" crowd, self-confidence, manipulation, and love are all touched in this story. The end was a little too pat for me but didn't ruin the overall beauty of the storytelling. This work made me want to read everything else written by this author. No heavy handed writing or fad sensationalism here, just a pure gem regarding a heavy and disturbing subject.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars FRIST FRUITS, February 1, 2003

By 

DevJohn01 (Somerset, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Fruits (Hardcover)

I just finished reading `FRIST FRUITS' by Penelope Evans and I think that I must have been reading a completely different book that most of the other reviewers. While I did enjoy this book it was certainly not what I would describe as bone chilling. Slightly disturbing maybe, sad definitely, but bone chilling absolutely not, nor did I find fourteen year old Kate Carr to be remotely evil. Quite the opposite in fact; I believe that Kate is an average teenager who thinks the world of her extremely egotistical and very much disturbed father. Keith Carr is Kate's fanatically religious father who preaches one thing but practices something completely different, and unfortunately Kate believes everything he has taught her and is left to deal with what happens as all her beliefs are slowly stripped away from her.
I really don't want to give too much of this book away, but it is almost impossible to write a proper review without doing so. However, I will say that although this book is primarily about Kate what disturbed me the most were the actions of her father who always believed that there was a "lesson" to be taught and his very unorthodox methods of teaching them. If in purchasing this book you are expecting a book frightening enough to keep you up at night this is not it. But if you are looking for something that explores the psychological effects that growing up in a household such as Kate's has on an adolescent girl this is the book for you.