Girl in the Arena [Hardcover]

Lise Haines (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 13, 2009

It’s a fight to the death—on live TV—when a gladiator’s daughter steps into the arena

Lyn is a neo-gladiator’s daughter, through and through.  Her mother has made a career out of marrying into the high-profile world of televised blood sport, and the rules of the Gladiator Sports Association are second nature to their family.  Always lend ineffable confidence to the gladiator.  Remind him constantly of his victories. And most importantly: Never leave the stadium when your father is dying. The rules help the family survive, but rules—and the GSA—can also turn against you. When a gifted young fighter kills Lyn’s seventh father, he also captures Lyn’s dowry bracelet, which means she must marry him... For fans of The Hunger Games and Fight Club, Lise Haines’ debut novel is a mesmerizing look at a world addicted to violence—a modern world that’s disturbingly easy to imagine.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lise Haines is Writer in Residence at Emerson College, has held a Briggs-Copeland lectureship at Harvard, and was a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Award and the Paterson Fiction Prize. She is the author of two adult novels, In My Sister’s Country and Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, as well as many essays and short stories. Girl in the Arena is her first work for young adults. She lives in the Boston area.

www.lisehaines.com

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens; 1 edition (October 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599903725
• ISBN-13: 978-1599903729
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (103 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,126,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent! September 6, 2009

By Deborah Wiley VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

What happens when reality television dictates what a person does in their life?

Lyn is the daughter of seven gladiators. Her mother, Allison, has made a career out of being a gladiator's wife, studiously following the credos of the Glad wives. Lyn wants a different path for herself but a traumatic turn of events leaves her at the mercy of Caesar's, the ruling body for the Gladiator Sports Association. Will Lyn be forced to marry and become a Glad wife or will she find her own path to success?

GIRL IN THE ARENA is told entirely from Lyn's perspective and in the present tense. While I normally find present tense to be distracting, in this case it adds to the tale by drawing the reader into Lyn's point of view and adding a sense of urgency to the pacing.

The world of GIRL IN THE ARENA isn't so far distant from our current world as one might think and almost feels like an alternate history. Reality television dominates the airwaves, as does sports programming, and it's not hard to imagine a meshing of the two. Even more powerful, however, is the emphasis on the role of women and the expectations dictated to them by the Glad society. Readers will find themselves quite frustrated with the unfairness of the system while cheering Lyn's ability to think outside the box. Thad is a great secondary character and his unique situation only serves to highlight the injustices Lyn is facing.

The only caution I would give to readers regarding GIRL IN THE ARENA isn't in regards to the actual book, but rather to the marketing. The blurb on the back reveals most of the plotline while the title implies that the book will involve fighting as a large part of the plot. GIRL IN THE ARENA is more of a stream of conscious style social commentary, one that will appeal to a certain segment of both the young adult and adult readers, but it is not your typical gladiator book. Excellent!

49 of 59 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Slack Writing Kills Smart Ideas August 3, 2009

By Kevin L. Nenstiel TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

What is this book? What's the matter with me that I don't get it? Is it the interchangeable characters, the impenetrable dialog, the cringe-inducing format, the cack-handed timing? Or is it something deeper? Or--dare I say--is it much simpler: has the author just bitten off more than she can chew?

In a dystopian near future, blood sport streams live on global TV. Neo-gladiators are talk show celebrities, and Lyn's mother Allison has made a career of marrying into gladiator stardom. But Allison is widowed for the seventh and final time, and because of arcane gladiator rules, Lyn has to marry her last father's killer. Lyn's psychic brother warns that whether she agrees or refuses this marriage, a grim future looms down hard on her.

Lise Haines takes this smart, promising premise and ruins it. She has no sense of story. Her characters talk when they should act, act when they should think, and spend so much time in gloomy shoe-gazing that whole chapters read like a teenager auditioning to star as an emo kid. Haines credits her daughter for encouraging this book, but clearly she's channeling an adult's idea of teen behavior.

Haines' sense of pace is terrible. Lyn tries to establish what a complex character she is for so long that I feel like I'm reading introductory material well past page 200. Then the ending is terribly abrupt. The conflict which the dust flap copy leads us to think is the heart of the story actually only comes up in the last sixty pages. This book takes too long to set up, and then the payoff is much too quick.

A novel about gladiators ought to include skillfully written violence. No such luck here. Haines treats combat scenes so fleetingly that I get no image of how the fights actually go down. All the gladiator scenes are very short and sketchy. Our author seems only interested in her heroine's internal hair-pulling, and everyone outside Lyn's own head is strictly one-dimensional.

May I mention the formatting? Everybody and his dog these days seems to want to rip off the deadpan quirkiness of Chuck Palahniuk and Roddy Doyle. Sadly the novelty has worn off, and the "schtick" of using em dashes as quotation marks, eschewing commas and other punctuation, and other similar text-message pidgin, is no longer idiosyncratic fun. I just get a headache trying to parse the paragraphs.

Haines writes checks she can't cash. Lyn is so egocentric that she can't let readers into her brain. This novel flags its surprises so obviously that by the time they arrive, we've been anticipating them for dozens of pages. Sadly, this book is proof that an excellent idea can be killed by rotten handling. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but I got to the end and was only glad that it was over. Ho hum.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Premise, but Uninteresting Way of Viewing It September 18, 2011

By Caitlee

Format:Hardcover

I got this book at the beginning of the summer and was rather excited about it. I always enjoy dystopian futures and fresh ideas are always interesting. The back of the book said nothing but that there would be a girl fighting in the arena for (I believe, having left the book at home rather than bring it to college with me) five minutes. It sounded to be a very interesting idea and I did not for one second entertain the idea that it would just focus on cat fights.

Well, I was right. But the truth of the matter is that the girl is (SPOILER) only in the arena herself for perhaps a total of five pages. The rest of the book seems to just want to beat me over the head with the idea of "this sort of thing is WRONG and YOU are wrong for buying a book just to see a young girl fight." Which is fine, except that EVERYTHING about the book told me it would actually about fighting. If I wanted a book that was decrying violence, I would have bought a book that said it was decrying it.

Maybe I'm the only one that felt that the entire point of that book WAS that message. Instead of focusing on the girl preparing for the fight, the book is mostly about the effects of this sort of society on the family unit, namely the main character's mother's life and the relationship she had with men and her daughter. There's also something about a quasi-romantic plotline with the guy she's supposed to fight, but it has very little to do with the rest of the story as a whole.

I was also bothered by the formatting of dialogue, namely the em dash at the beginning and absolutely no quotation marks. Apparently this is how novels in Spanish are formatted, but having never read any of those myself, it comes as more of a distraction than a clever and refreshing way of formatting.

All in all, I feel that this book did not deliver anything that it promised (even the girl on the cover makes no sense as the main character is BALD for most of the book). The idea was interesting and even could have been done without violence, as seems to be its goal, but is done uninterestingly and with so little focus that I barely remember the parts that I did like, if there were anyway.

If you like social commentary, perhaps this book is for you. But if you want a story about a girl fighting? Go look elsewhere. You won't find it here.