A coming-of-age novel features Rose, a seven year old who becomes a tragic victim of her mother's affair with a sea captain and is forced to grow up in squalor and poverty in London. By the author of Sexual Intercourse.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Surely we can read into the fact that the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud chooses to bestow on the eponymous narrator of her second novel (after Sexual Intercourse ) her own given name. Rose, 28, tells her life story--in a "book"that takes her two years to write--not as a chronological account but as journal-like reminiscences and impressions of events, interspersed with occasional comments on the current state of her affairs. She describes her unconventional early childhood on a freighter sailing between England, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Trinidad with her mother, her three siblings and Klaus, her mother's lover and the ship's captain. Rose initially mistakes Klaus's sexual advances toward her as a sign of his quasi-paternal affection, but not for long. The family, without Klaus, returns to England, where they live in poverty. As a young teenager in the early 1970s, Rose busies herself with barbituates and boys; her mother lacks the strength to tame her children. When Klaus reappears and again sexually abuses Rose, her mother accuses her of asking for it. The women in Rose's life are abused and abandoned by men--she describes her sense that they share "a female mystery, some kind of damage." Boyt's language is poetic; her descriptions through Rose's strong voice of sights, scents, people and moods are vivid, often painful but always lively .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this bleak autobiographical novel, the protagonist, Rose, and her siblings accompany their hapless mother through her various misadventures with men. The story opens as the family join their mother's current lover, a handsome but abusive sea captain, on a ship in icy Denmark. They travel with him around Spain, South America, and the West Indies until they come to settle briefly in Trinidad. After their ship sinks, they return without the captain to a life of genteel poverty in the swinging London of the Sixties, where the now-teenaged children freely experiment with sex and drugs. Rose's mother continues to have lovers and babies until, at last, the sea captain makes a violent reappearance. The only remarkable thing about this choppy and cheerless novel is that its author is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. A marginal purchase.
- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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