34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A gritty coming-of-age tale..., February 17, 2003
For those who enjoy books about teenagers and coming-of-age stories, The Torn Skirt is just for you. Rebecca Godfrey's offering, however, is a very dark, edgy tale of drugs, prostitution, crime, and runaways. Very good and very scary.
Sara Shaw is tough. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she lives with her hippie, drug-addict father and plays the role of caretaker and billpayer as best she can. Suddenly, once Sara turns 16, things in her life start changing. A form of rebellion heats up inside of her, made more flammable by her father's abrupt departure from her life and a strange and elusive girl named Justine whom she meets while skipping school. Now Sara is on her own and not sure where to go from there. However, the girl Justine has piqued her interest and Sara sets out to find her again. This journey will lead Sara into a world of all sorts of illegal, terrifying things -- a journey that ultimately comes to a horrible conclusion.
I enjoyed this book, but I believe it isn't for everybody. The writing style is a bit poetic, which at times can be sort of weird (and annoying) to read through. Rebecca Godrey is quite talented, though, and the foreshadowing of the ending was enough to keep me turning the pages to find out what happens. The Torn Skirt does open readers' eyes to a new world of teenage rebellion and all the scary things that hide around each corner. The character of Sara Shaw is both innocent and experienced, and I felt motherly and protective toward this girl while reading her story. The mark of a good book: one where the author has managed to make me truly care about a character. Sara Shaw, The Torn Skirt, and Rebecca Godfrey will remain in my mind for quite some time.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dissapointing, January 5, 2005
A Kid's Review
"Torn Skirt" piqued my interested when I first learned of it while researching the tragic story of Reena Virk, a 14 year old girl that was savagely beaten and drowned by her peers. Apparently Godfrey has been writing "Under the Bridge," a true crime book about about Virk's case. When I found out that she had already released a novel called "Torn Skirt", I decided to pick it up as I enjoy well-written coming of age stories.
Basically, the premise is this: 16 year old Sarah Shaw is a bored suburban youth that has been recently abandonned by her father. With nothing better to do, she sets out accross Victoria's underworld to find Justine, a street kid that offered her the hope of a more exciting life.
I finished the book yesterday in less than 3 hours, and today I am left regretting ever having bought it. Truly, I should have listened to the significant but dissenting reviewers on amazon. The TYPE of negative reviews on the site should have served as a warning sign. These reviewers weren't writing outraged reviews because they were shocked by the strong content of the book; they were instead writing reviews because they were shocked by how bad the writing was, and how unrealistic the story was.
As a teenage writer, I read fiction mainly for the beauty of words. Still, if an author possesses enough creativity and imagination, I'll read for the storytelling instead. This book lacks in both departments. The writing is incredibly bad, probably a result of the author's attempts to make this sound as if it really was written by a 16 year old girl. To achieve this, she regularly punctuates her run on sentences with uncessecary "f*cks" and "I really don't cares". 80 pages into the book, the book completely loses touch with reality, at which point I got fed up with the bad writing and stopped caring whether about when or how Sara would meet the "elusive Justine" again. Sara robs a john, drops out of school, breaks up with her boyfriend and her old crowd, leaves home, runs with a posse of teen prostitutes, moves in with a boyfriend and breaks up with him, is placed into a a group home, parties in a house of debauchery, is involved in a violent stabbing, and is put into juvenile detention, all seemingly over a few days. Please. What was Godfrey thinking? It doesn't help that all the teen girls in the book are all interchangeable. China, Amber, Justine, or even Sara - who cares? At one point in the book we are told that such girls are seen by the police as "bic lighters" - lost girls whose lives are seen as disposable. Ironically, the police are right about that, though not because they come from troubled families - these girls are disposeable because they are so one dimensional that it is difficult to care about any of them. Furthermore, another unrealistic element of this book is that it seems to cast the prostitutes and deliquents as young, fun loving girls having a blast while they make a few bucks. Basically, it emphasizes having a good time over the incredible hurt and pain that real life girls like these go through. Apparently, I wasn't the only person who picked up on this, because a series of teenagers left disturbing comments on Godfrey's site about how they wished that these girls really existed so that they could party with them or even BE them.
To be honest, the book seems like something I would write. I have known street kids, teen prostitutes and drug addicts, but I've never lived the life myself. Like Godfrey, I could take stabs at what that life must be like, but the end result would be underlined by a certain fakeness, a lack of sincerity.
I would recommend passing this one up, as there are far better books written on this general subject. The first - and you can bet that Miss Godfrey is familiar with it - is Evelyn Lau's real diary, Runaway. In it, Lau logs her experiences on the street in late 80s Vancouver as a teenage prostitute - and unlike Godfrey's Sara, that little girl really really, really could write.
The second book is White Oleander by Janet Fitch, which deals with an abandonned teenage girl who is shuffled from place to place through the foster care system. Unlike Runaway, White Oleander is really hit or miss. There are certain parts where it suffers from the same problem as Torn Skirt - it gets wrapped up in excessive teenage melodrama that doesn't come across as being quite real. At other times, White Oleander is so fresh and vividly painted that its characters and their problems are deeply touching. At all times, Fitch's writing is beautifully poetic, the mark of a woman that has mastered her craft.
As for Torn Skirt, it deserves 4 stars for the concept, and 0 for the excecution. Overall, 2 stars seems fair to me.
I'm still looking forward to the Reena Virk book, but admittedly less so after having read "Torn Skirt." Who knows, maybe fiction isn't Godfrey's forte and Under the Bridge will prove be a far superior work. One can only hope that will be the case.
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