Description:
Adele is an involved curio questioning treasured notions of civilization, innocence, and the natural. The book opens in medias res with Celia Pippet, a feminist magazine publisher, stealing something from the British museum. The specimen drawer, however, contains not one mummified--and disgusting--object, but two. Celia and an old friend, Martin, and a larger-than-life academic, Tamara, then head off with their booty to the south of France in order to right an old injustice, which they intend to link to the campaign to end clitoridectomies. Sound broad, and unlikely? Mary Flanagan more than mitigates this possibility by making her knowing perpetrators well aware of their outlandish situation: "Oh please, darling. That's so Perils of Pauline," one protests. Fifty years before, a Parisian gynecologist had rescued a girl from near death at the hands of vicious villagers. This child, Adele, uniquely agile and undeniably oversexed, becomes an obsession for the doctor, his sister, and, it seems, half of brothel-going Paris. Is she retarded, an abomination, or a true innocent? (Judging from some of the sexual contortions she gets up to, this last would seem unlikely, but not entirely in Flanagan's inventive narrative.) Unfortunately, Dr. Sylvester, the girl's protector, turns out to be vile, proprietary, and far too interested in fashionable notions of eugenics (it is 1936). When Adele transgresses once too often, he performs a clitoridectomy, or so Celia, Martin, and Tamara think. Throughout this novel of lascivious twists and turns, Flanagan stays several steps ahead of her crusaders and makes the grotesque moving. Though some readers will be revolted by Adele, more will be surprisingly touched.
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