Kick the Animal Out [Paperback]

Veronique Ovalde (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2007

An imaginative girl constructs a tale of incestuous obsession, teenage love, and willful desertion to explain her mother s disappearance. Fifteen-year-old Rose is trying to make sense of her world. Her mother a beautiful woman with signature stiletto heels, bright clothes, and the synthetic gleam of a blond wig has vanished, and Rose is convinced that she must be in danger. Unable to cope with the possibility of having been abandoned, Rose uses her vivid imagination to construct her own explanation for her mother s sudden disappearance. Her father suspiciously carries on with his life, in no hurry to contact the police. Coupled with Rose s newfound knowledge that he is not actually the ringleader of a circus, she begins to doubt that he is even her real father. As Rose pieces together snippets of remembered conversations and the half-truths she is fed by adults, she creates her own romantic narrative about the disappearance one that is as difficult to accept as the truth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the heart of Ovaldé's fourth novel is 15-year-old Rose, suffering from an unspecified condition that stunts her physical and emotional development and requires her to attend "the Institute." When her beloved mother grows increasingly despondent, Rose tries to snap her out of it with a dramatic exit. Upon returning from the hospital, though, Rose finds her mother gone, and her perennially cheerful father humiliated. Certain there is more than domestic dissatisfaction at work, Rose weaves her mother's half-true childhood stories and clues from an elderly neighbor into a morbid but colorful biography, in which her own family is but a brief pause in the romantic sweep of her mother's life. The real world, however, soon intrudes. Rose's real and imagined worlds are filled with rich sensory detail-Rose imagines her mother in a mountain village, where "beyond the reflected light on the snow there is complete darkness only mottled by the dancing snowflakes, like a spectral storm of miniature meteorites." Flighty mothers and young narrators of suspect authority are familiar territory, but Ovaldé's lyric gifts makes for a seductive story.
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From Booklist

Rose, a young Frenchwoman who may or may not be 15 and may or may not be a dwarf, re-creates the adolescence of her mother--also named Rose--who has vanished (she may or may not have gone home to her mother). This leaves Rose, who may or may not be insane (she spends most days in a place called "The Institute") alone with the man who may or may not be her father and who may or may not be the manager of a circus. Readers may or may not enjoy this feast of ambiguity. Those who don't will leave the table long before the main course; those who stay will savor Hunter's graceful translation of the poetic text of Ovalde's fourth novel. They may also enjoy teasing the truth out of the lies that adults have told Rose and the fantasies she seems to prefer to reality. Or not, as the case may be. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 212 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (April 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159692232X
• ISBN-13: 978-1596922327
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,464,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Lovely study of a girl's search for her mother, March 21, 2011

By 

Feanor (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kick the Animal Out (Paperback)

Véronique Ovaldé's Kick the Animal Out is a narrative from the viewpoint of a mentally-unbalanced girl desperate to locate her mother. This is an exploration of the lush mindscape of the fifteen year-old Rose who adores her mother and is baffled and upset by her father's seeming lack of anxiety when her mother vanishes. She seeks answers in her mother's past, uncovering details of old loves and past crimes. This is a slim book set in a sunny coast of France completely at odds with Rose's anguish, and it drags the reader into her world of 'immeasurable loss' more surely and heartbreakingly than weightier tomes by less assured writers. Well worth a read.