Customer Reviews

Shut the Door

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Harry is in Cleveland on business for two weeks. His wife Beatrice misses making him breakfast as their daughters seventeen years old Vivian and sixteen years old Lilliana make their own meals. To pass time as she waits for Harry to return, Beatrice continues to prepare her spouse's favorite meals.

Harry, on the other hand, is elated to escape his two tedious roles of husband and father. He plans to risk everything to find some fun and perhaps even purpose while in Cleveland.

Neither seems aware that two teens live in their household. For instance Lilli has sex with older males in her bedroom while mom cooks. However, she has met her match in her guitar teacher Paul who rejects her siren's lure so she reacts by mutilating herself. The studious virginal Vivian decides to reengineer herself with a piercing, dye, a tattoo, and a food disorder so that she can gain entrance to the in crowd, but that fails when high school Queen Katerina tricks her into lesbian posing. Still she is on her way to sexual freedom even as her sibling turns to chastity.

SHUT THE DOOR is an intriguing look at a middle class family whose set roles no longer provide solace so except for Bea still making brisket each seeks something new that devastates the "truce" between them. The character driven story line is at its strongest in the first three quarters of the novel as the audience becomes intimately involved with each character as perspectives rotates between them. Ironically the tale loses a bit of steam once the cast is fully known though the plot contains a surprisingly powerful closing twist. Amanda Marquit provides a fascinating family drama starring four individuals who no longer know one another though they live under the same roof.

Harriet Klausner

Spoon-fed and predictable narrative, strong dialogue. While I have nothing short of utter awe and amazement that a 16-year-old wrote this novel, I will suggest that this entire premise of the nucear-suburban-family-run-amok can be grasped in brilliant clarity in the classic Richard Yates novel, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD.

great characters but this book dragged. i skimmed the last 40 pages to see what happened. it was much of the same...

This wasn't a terrible book - I read it all the way to the end - but I was kind of waiting for it to end. I cared just enough about the characters to see what was going to happen to them. <Spoiler alert> Every character is a cliche - the codependent, needy wife; the husband who wants to abdicate his responsibilities and takes up with a prostitute; an anorexic girl; and a girl who cuts herself with razors and Swiss army knives. Marquit's jaded, in-your-face style, with liberal use of profanity and a Darwinian view of high school, is one-sided. Her characters are GOOD or BAD, not multi-dimensional. As far as the plot goes, I got the sense that most of this stuff had never happened to her, and she was going for shock value rather than authenticity. For a high school experience that is rendered in living, breathing, convincing color, I would recommend Curtis Sittenfeld's PREP instead.

I loved this book, i absolutely could not put it down... i always wanted to read it...i was obesessed with the characters and their "wants" it was intriguing...i could realate to vivian in many ways as well as liliana..Amanda did a great job and i cant wait for her to write more books...

After reading "shut the door," I realized how much the family in this story is almost exactly like many families I know. Marquit did an awesome job of portraying the american family, which is not so perfect. I recommend this book to all who understand the feeling of being lost in their own family.

I think it is false when I hear people say that teenagers can't identify with the characters or that the characters in the story are exaggerated, because I am sixteen and can relate completely with the characters Amanda Marquit created. I would recommend this book for people who enjoy the movie "thirteen" or the book by Rebecca ray "Pure". This novel is extremely realistic in my opinion and i think the average teen would enjoy it very much.

Initially I was intrigued not only by the premise of "Shut the Door" (a family who didn't understand each other, let alone communicate), but also by the notes on the author, who is a teenage girl living a privileged life in New York City, which is something with which I am very familiar. I, too, wrote when I was fourteen-- I wrote short stories, novellas, poems, and even screenplays-- but most of what I wrote was very repetitive and sophomoric, feeling like I had to drill a point home in order to make it, and that is exactly what Amanda Marquit has done here. The difference is, Marquit should have had an editor to point out those flaws because the characters are all there: the plot just needs an overhaul.

The opening pages set up the characters and the story nicely: a family living under one roof but in very different worlds. The mother, Beatrice, dotes on her husband and is almost OCD in her cleaning of the house and of cooking meals. She goes so far as to prepare favorite meals for her husband, who is absent from the home, and then she sits across from his empty chair and talks to him, hearing return praise and seeing an invisible smile in her own mind. She is a woman who does not even try to connect with her two teenage daughters: she refuses to even enter their rooms. She still talks about her husband like the puppy love of her younger years: she is truly a woman in denial. She would, however, be the most interesting character if Marquit ever bothered to explore her. Instead of looking at a woman who was once a youthful free spirit dreaming of a perfect familial life, she showed us a woman in a routine, and she never once strayed from that routine, so we were forced to endure pages after pages of those meal preparations-- each time a different food, a slight variation on the one-sided conversation she'd have with her husband as she prepared said food but never a new action. It didn't just make me want to slap Bea but also Marquit: to slap her out of the slump and make her give us a change of scenery if nothing else. I just couldn't accept that Bea was so one-note on purpose: that she really had nothing else to her; I couldn't believe this she was deliberately written as so shallow.

In fact, all of the characters needed to be more complex. It was all food and sex to them and nothing else. And if Bea was supposed to be incapable of more than one thought, the father of the story, Harry, certainly shouldn't have been. Hundreds of miles away from his wife on a business trip, he blows off business meetings, drinks himself into stupors, and avoids his wife's calls. He curses his family and his responsibilities and repeats how he doesn't love his family and should just not go home. He is adolescent and whiny, and he manages to fall into a similar puppy love to Bea's while out in Cleveland, only his is more like the lust of a boy first discovering the opposite sex and letting the wrong head make his decisions.

The girls, Lilliana the "rebel" and Vivian "the good one" each think they are nothing like the other but actually share many of the same insecurities and fears, as all teenage girls do. Lilli engages is meaningless sex with various boys, and when that no longer gives her enough of a high, she resorts to cutting herself to feel something, while Vivian starves herself, pierces, tattoos, dyes her hair, and basically acts as a lackey to some high school girl just to be talked about and desired. She goes from being a bookworm with her head on straight to a kid getting trashed every weekend and in desperate need of a boyfriend so she can lose her virginity. What they fail to realize, and what the author fails to point out (perhaps because she, too, is just a teenager and cannot look at their situations objectively), is that they are doing all the conformist things to stand out one would do when they really just want to fit in.

One major problem with the flow of the book is that Bea and Harry's "chapters" are written in such adolescent tones I couldn't take them seriously as adults, and I found myself skimming through their sections. All four characters are childish when they open their mouths and also when they are alone with their own thoughts, and to me it did not feel like a conscious decision on the author's part to give them all that similar voice (in order to say we're all screwed up in the same ways, no matter the age), but rather it sounded like an amateur writer who herself was juvenile in age as well as experience.

The story takes place over a period of two weeks, and at least when reading the girls' "chapters," it feels like time is moving, although at an uneven pace when compared to their parents. Vivian goes through a complete physical transformation, and while she spends quite a few pages agonizing over getting her tattoo and befriending Katerina, who is her "Queen Bee," when you consider the time frame of fourteen short days, how much thought could she really have given anything? The same goes for Lilli's escalation in her self-mutilation and her infatuation with the music store clerk/guitar teacher Paul: she visits him at the store what has to be every day in such a short time frame, going from thinking he was kind of cute but not the guy she'd normally go after to professing her love for him (even if only to the readers).

Marquit spends about one hundred and fifty pages setting up these characters and their flaws and their "desires." She repeats the imagery of each so much, it is almost like she is trying to get the characters straight in her own mind. When things finally start to happen, around page 216, all you feel is: "Finally!" And then you're on 225, and you turn the page, and it's the acknowledgments. Nothing feels finished. Nothing feels even remotely wrapped up or "dealt with." It's like a stream of conscious world that just ran out-- perhaps due to boredom. Again, it is a problem a good editor should have pointed out: the first two acts are way too heavy, and the third act doesn't get going until nine pages before the end (in film terms): it is completely unbalanced, which is quite poetic, considering it mirrors the mental states of the characters.

Marquit does set up an extremely unique and fascinating world, but unfortunately there is no pay off: she never dives in and explores that world. We as readers are always ahead of the characters: we are figuring out their psychology when they can only wonder. Is it because we have an objective third-party outlook? No, it is because we are adults, and each one of these four characters are juvenile, petty, and living on the surface. And for a story that spends so much time in each character's head-- inner monologue-style-- that is not okay.

I didn't simply want to shut the door, but also the cover of this book.

I like Marquit's style, absolutely hated the book as a whole.

Someone earlier mentioned that teenagers cannot identify themselves well with this novel. I believe this is completely false. While the characters in this novel might be a bit exaggerated, the emotions each character displays are certainly things one can relate to from time to time...especially teenage girls. Desperation, hopelessness, loss of direction, superficial goals, confusion; they are real problems that don't just exist in the world of books, hollywood and soap operas. I enjoyed Marquit's portrayal of these emotions through the characters (who are all deliciously troubled and screwed up).

The thing that killed the book for me though is how repetitive Marquit got after the first thirty-ish pages. After being so moved by the first thirty pages, I then half-heartedly read/skimmed through the rest of the book.

I look forward to reading Marquit's writing in 5-10 years.

I am a high school teacher in the Denver area. I try to read all new novels that I think will be of interest or interesting to my students. I don't think any student would identify with this book as all the characters are so exagerated in their portrayals. The book tended to be black or white and nothing in between. I realize a young adult wrote this but that in itself does not make it valid. I would love to discover a book of truth and one my students could identify with pertaining to their "everyday" lives.