10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
haunting & beautifully written, January 29, 2008
This novel is a treasure -- it simultaneously captures the hopefulness of a coconut-scented summer's day and the loneliness of a girl who yearns for female intimacy. Who hasn't been there? McLain's descriptions of Jamie's internal and external worlds bring it all back.
Having read all of McLain's poetry and her memoir, her new novel is no surprise. The writing is sensual and heartbreaking, the study of character honest and deep. The secrets that connect Jamie and her uncle will haunt you just as they do their characters.
If you liked Dorothy Allison's Ruth Anne in [...] out of NC or Carson McCullers's Frankie in The Member of the Wedding or Marilyn Robinson's Ruth in Housekeeping, then you'll like Paula McLain's Jamie in A Ticket to Ride.
Read this novel & then go back and read McLain's other work. You won't be sorry.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Fawn was responsible for all the good things, like a force of nature "a neutron star, pulling everything her way.", January 14, 2008
An adolescent friendship forms the core of this remarkable and beautifully written novel where emotions end up colliding in a maelstrom of guilt and betrayal. At its heart A Ticket to Ride is a love story between a niece and her uncle and between a brother and his younger sister as it charts the fertile territory of family bonds and shows how rampant loyalty can sometimes have devastating consequences.
It is the summer of 1973 and the young Jamie feels an unsteady mixture of delight and hesitance when her uncle Raymond tells her that her older cousin Fawn Delacorte will be flying in from Phoenix and staying with them both for summer at their home in Moline, Illinois. Raymond doesn't elaborate on the reasons Fawn will be staying only to say that according to Fawn's mother Camille, the girl is currently "at loose ends' and a companion for the season is certainly something that could be of benefit to both girls.
Shy and diffident, Jamie considers herself "the tragic girl," the one who keeps her asthma inhaler in her lunch box, who reads to much and who spends too much time alone. So she doesn't know quite what to make of Fawn when Raymond and Jamie pick Fawn up from O'Hare International Airport and she suddenly appears at the arrival gate, looking crisp and shiny, a type of magic potion, and a walking and talking human elixir.
The friendship begins with a present of a purse, "breath-mint white, the size of an apple with a long leather strap," the object in stark contrast to Jamie's dowdy denim jumper with fat plastic buttons, and her suntan pantyhose pooling at her knees. But Jamie senses promise here and in the days after Fawn's arrival nothing and everything happens. Clearly Jamie wants Fawn to become her best and most treasured friend with all the ferocity that she can muster.
This older, glamorous girl is someone whom Jamie can talk to for the first time in years. Their days filled with music and television as Jamie finds herself dressing for Fawn's approval, parting her hair the way Fawn instructs as they read magazines together, and sunbathing on the side of the house, talking until late at night, Fawn totally free with her forbidden secrets. Fawn seems so certain of herself and the world at large that Jamie just feels relieved to be guided by her, trusting Fawn's sense of things.
Meanwhile, Raymond has his own story to tell. Eight years earlier, he reflects on his troubled sister Suzette, the mother of Jamie. A damaged and insecure soul, Suzette spent much of her short life running from the ridiculous choices she made and the willing self-destructiveness that mired much of her life. Over the years Raymond has had to do battle with the endless boyfriends, the bankruptcies, and the Dexedrine that has kept her thin and brutally optimistic: "the girl's such trouble" remarks Raymond's best friend Leon, more than once.
A bad news, high-risk, and hard luck case, Raymond can never just walk away from his beloved sister, even after all the mistakes, "it wasn't easy to go on caring about Suzette, but sometimes love wasn't easy." But now, with Jamie finally entrusted to his care, and Fawn leading her astray the images of Suzette's hardscrabble life are beginning to manifest itself in her daughter. Certainly for Jamie, the images of her mother constantly loom onto the horizon "like a cloud of worry or dread or longing."
When a drunken joyride to Chicago goes terribly wrong and a school friend of Jamie's goes missing, Jamie's friendship with Fawn is finally tested to the maximum. Like her mother before her, things come pretty far and pretty fast with all of the boys and the drinking and the hanging out with the local rock bands. Fawn continually manipulates Jamie's sense of power, knowing exactly what she needs to do to get what she wants in every instance; "like a dazzling and terrifying spider, she never backs down."
In truly spectacular prose, author Paula McLain beautifully juxtaposes the lives of both this mother and daughter, and of course the brother who tries with all his heart to help. Suzette tumbles from one radioactive ex-boyfriend to another, seemingly drawn to them in an almost pathological way, while over the years Raymond tries to rescue her again and again from her transient life of terrible mistakes and missed opportunities.
The bonds of family eventually propel this exquisite novel, Jamie's assignation with Fawn remaining at the center along with her desperate need to connect and to feel better about herself and her place in the world. She both loves and hates Fawn, enamored with her surly self-confidence, yet also blindsided by sharp-edged vanity and selfishness. Just like two sides of the same coin, Fawn ends up challenging Jamie's best intentions as her friend and her partner in crime, and what she thinks is best for her new found friend. Mike Leonard January 08.
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