Description:
Lord of the Flies stands as the classic treatment of the cruelty that children can inflict upon one another, but William Golding and his sadistic tribe of stranded English schoolboys probably seem obvious and brutish to Penelope Evans (The Last Girl, Freezing). Where Golding's novel concentrates on encroaching anarchy and a regression to savagery (pig heads on sticks, as every high school sophomore remembers), Evans's First Fruits coolly focuses on the subtleties of strictly regimented adolescent conduct. Butchering pigs seems dull compared to the barbed nuances of classroom seating and sleepover invitations. Evans's Scottish narrator, Kate Carr, is 14 years old, manipulative, deceitful, and utterly compelling. Her voice is haunted and haunting: Something about me. People can see I'm special. Something about my eyes, perhaps, out of the ordinary. Something he's put there. That's why you have to remember to smile. Smiling makes the world a better place. It makes people easier to ... deal with. And anyway, why not smile? I've got reason to smile. I'm his daughter. The luckiest girl alive. Except for the one thing. He is Keith Carr, charismatic evangelist. The "one thing" is Kate's badly burned leg, legacy of an event that Keith, who cannot bear the stigma of spiritual or physical imperfection, will not allow his daughter to remember. The conflict between the rigidity of dogma and the fluidity of memory lies at the heart of the novel, as little by little the extent of Keith's control over his daughter percolates from the depths of the novel to its deceptively placid surface. Kate's increasing desperation to escape the laserlike intensity of her father's attention is clear. She wonders "what it would be like not to be the one and only. To be invisible. Because attention shared would be attention halved." When she elects to share that attention with her misfit classmates Lydia and Moira, hoping their respective brilliance and opacity will tantalize Keith, she finds herself drawn into a complex web of religion, seduction, memory, and desire that moves her inexorably into the past. The novel is both powerfully poignant and remarkably restrained. Kate is a creature of suggestion, rather than statement. The narrative hovers around the absence at its center, like a moth around a flame. --Kelly Flynn
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