Customer Reviews

Rat

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I was dismayed when I read the two other reviews of "Rat." I really enjoyed it. I thought it was well-written (and I'm a writer, so very picky about that) flowed well, and introduced a segment of life I wasn't familiar with. I loved Rat as a young mother-figure to Morgan, as she's trying to discover the connections in her own life. And I really loved the descriptions of Southern France, the descripion of "townies" who make their livings in a resort location that's only crowded during the summer.

Emotionally, I thought it was complex, powerful and true. We have Rat's loving, generous, yet immature and self-serving mother. And the English father who wants no connection with her until she forces it. And the grandmother, whose emotional connection I won't spoil for those that haven't read the book yet. I liked that the writer didn't pull any punches emotionally either.

I'll be recommending "Rat" to friends.

This not very complex novel is about family love but also about the destructiveness of families. It's about interracial warfare but also about how easily human relationships can transcend race.

"Rat" is 15-year old shoeless Celia Bonnet -- and make that "Bonnet" sound like "Bonnay" in your head, because this is the South of France. Not the Riviera of film festivals and fabulous yacht parties, but the far more raffish beaches as far to the South West as you can get without hearing Spanish. The characters are more likely to be dealing drugs than baccarat cards. In nearby Perpignan, daily
battles between immigrants and natives keep the scorching city on edge, and the schools all have metal detectors at their entrances.

No wonder Rat is pissed off. She's the product of a one-night stand between her French junk-dealing mother and a wealthy English artist. The conception part of the encounter seems to have been deliberate on the part of the mother, and Gillem, the resentful father, pays child support by standing order and shuns further contact. Rat is told only that he's English and the son of a very famous and very glamorous model.

Rat has informally adopted nine year old Morgan as a younger brother. Arabic, the son of another single mother who died of AIDS, Morgan is football crazy but also familiar with the electronic marvels of our age. You feel him shrug with resignation as he follows Rat on whatever crazy exploit she cares to dream up. It's summer, the restaurants are full of sunburned tourists and life on the polluted beaches is free.

The central event in the book is the sexual molestation of Morgan by another passing lover of Rat's mother. Rat witnesses it, but her mother refuses to believe it. The way the author describes the impact of this affront is very true to life, I think. If her French family appears feckless, Rat thinks, perhaps my father's family has some feck. She proceeds to locate Gillem by -- what else? -- Google, and announces to Morgan that they're off to London.

They arrive precisely on page 191 of this 293-page work, and the last third -- perhaps what the author thought of as the heart of the book -- is the impact of these two urchins on an upper middle class intellectual family in West London. I won't say more than that Morgan's football talents go down surprisingly well, and that Rat gets involved in the London underground bombings of July 2005 -- a late reminder that race relations are a theme of the book.

It's put-downable, this book. I lost no sleeping hours beacause of it. It did make me think a bit, however. The author is obviously very familiar with both settings and, I surmise, more admiring of life as it's lived in French Catalonia than in Westbourne Park. The dialog is easy to read but you have to keep reminding yourself that these people -- even the Londoners -- are really speaking French. The author could have made more of this, I think, perhaps weaving some French idiom into the English.

Buy it and enjoy it unless family dynamics give you the screaming ab-dabs. Let's face it -- they have that effect on too many of us.

Rat
Fernanda Eberstadt

Rat, a French girl that never met her father and pretends to resent him, finds herself running away to meet him and her legendary grandmother after her adopted brother gets molested by her moms boyfriend. This is a little adventure to see how she finds him, if she can get to him and what she learns about herself and what she thought was her life along the way.

Eberstadt captures the universal fears and fantasy that plagues singularly-parented children. The struggle between loyalty to the parent that kept you and the unavoidable curiosity of and yearning to know the parent that didn't stick around. It's also interesting, the dynamic she has with her mother and home life that, while difficult and lacking, she defends (against no one in particular except maybe herself) and the internal struggle she has between resentment of her father and the fairytale she secretly hoards about the life he has lived without her and the relationship they will have if they meet.

Rat is a coming of age story for both the girl and her parents alike. It's reflective and eye-opening. I think this maybe a new kind of fairytale. A story where, in the end, people deal with what's really going on and how they really feel in a way that's honest, forward-moving and doable. There's emotion, clarity, and acceptance.

I really liked this book!

Rat is a thoughtful young girl growing up in what could be called difficult circumstances in the south of France. The author creates complex characters. There are no simple answers to Rat's life. Yes, we would like her mother to be more responsible. Yet in her way she loves Rat and more importantly both Rat and her brother love her mother.
Rat becomes obsessed about finding her father and a solution to all of her problems. But it doesn't happen that way. Her Father too is a complicated person, unable to show or even identify what he is feeling.
The writing was suburb and the descriptions of the settings evoked a sense of Rat's world. No, it wasn't fast paced and it didn't give any easy answers. But you get into the heads of all of the characters and you feel for them. What more can you ask?