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Like The Red Panda by Andrea Seigel
The Blurb On The Back:
Stella is a girl we all know but rarely meet in fiction - seventeen, smart, attractive, and deeply alienated. In thi snovel, she narrates her last two weeks of high school in Orange County, California. Here is what it is like to be a smart high school senior, already philosophically far, far away but still expected to endure the absurdly intensive AP final exams, the cool posturing of the boys, and the unnecessary competitiveness of the girls. Beneath Stella's mordantly funny take on her life is the decisiveness with which she disengages from it.
With unflinching honesty, remarkable wit, and a spare, vivid prose, Stella turns her farewell to Suburbia into a wry philosophical inquiry.
There's a reason why we rarely meet girls like Stella in fiction - she's implausibly self-aware, far too capable of coming up with witty and ironic comments for the reader to understand why she's so alienated and she's also whiny. Really, really whiny.
Andrea Siegel writes well and fluidly - there are amusing episodes in the story and some parts of it ring very true for anyone who's been in school (in particular, the competitiveness that Ashley demonstrates towards Stella all the time). However, she uses big implausibilities to move the plot and they really jarred with me.
Firstly we need to believe that Stella's parents were both cocaine addicts who died from an accidental overdose on Stella's 11th birthday (and that Stella only discovered this when she came back from a game of treasure hunt with her birthday party guests). Secondly, we need to believe that because Stella's grandfather, Donald, didn't want to take care of her, she was adopted by a manager at a biscuit corporation and his stay-at-home wife, the latter of whom doesn't know how to relate to Stella and neither of whom ever get close to (or make any real attempt to get close to) her. Thirdly, even knowing how her parents died and acknowledging that they were cocaine addicts throughout her entire childhood, Stella knowingly goes out with a drug dealer called Daniel. Any one of these, I could have bought but all three were just too much. For someone who is supposedly so intelligent, it just doesn't make any sense.
The relationship between Stella and her grandfather, Donald, is too convoluted so what should be a moving final chapter - wherein they decide to commit suicide together, utterly fails in its objective. In fact, I was sitting there thinking "get on with it, already". Partly this is because she has one scene where Donald tries to commit suicide in the shower just before Stella arrives to see him, only to fail. Again, the scene is witty in the dark humour vein, but at the same time, you wonder why he wants to kill himself and never get an answer.
Personally, the character who I was most interested in was Ainsley, the underachiever friend of Ashley who's tolerated as a convenient mate rather than liked in her own right. Seigel made her an effortlessly believable creation - the girl who traces in art class and slips underneath everyone's radar, who even her mother pushes aside in favour of her 'friend' Ashley and yet the person who wrote the speech chosen for the graduation ceremony. I was pleased that Seigel gave her a more hopeful future and would have liked to have seen her play a more active part in the narrative.
The final point that I wanted to make was that Seigel writes the book in the first person but uses a conceit of having Stella write down her thoughts of the last two weeks as a kind of memorium diary, which people can read after she kills herself. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but there were times when I got the feeling she forgot about what the purpose was and also, it raises more credibility issues because Stella's memory of complicated events is so perfect (we're told she's got a photographic memory, but whatever).
The Verdict:
It's well-written, has some good black humour but for me failed by having an implausible central character, with too many contrivances driving the plot. That said, I would definitely be interested in reading more of what Ms Seigel has to offer as the voice is strong and confident.
Stella is a girl we all know but rarely meet in fiction - seventeen, smart, attractive, and deeply alienated. In thi snovel, she narrates her last two weeks of high school in Orange County, California. Here is what it is like to be a smart high school senior, already philosophically far, far away but still expected to endure the absurdly intensive AP final exams, the cool posturing of the boys, and the unnecessary competitiveness of the girls. Beneath Stella's mordantly funny take on her life is the decisiveness with which she disengages from it.
With unflinching honesty, remarkable wit, and a spare, vivid prose, Stella turns her farewell to Suburbia into a wry philosophical inquiry.
There's a reason why we rarely meet girls like Stella in fiction - she's implausibly self-aware, far too capable of coming up with witty and ironic comments for the reader to understand why she's so alienated and she's also whiny. Really, really whiny.
Andrea Siegel writes well and fluidly - there are amusing episodes in the story and some parts of it ring very true for anyone who's been in school (in particular, the competitiveness that Ashley demonstrates towards Stella all the time). However, she uses big implausibilities to move the plot and they really jarred with me.
Firstly we need to believe that Stella's parents were both cocaine addicts who died from an accidental overdose on Stella's 11th birthday (and that Stella only discovered this when she came back from a game of treasure hunt with her birthday party guests). Secondly, we need to believe that because Stella's grandfather, Donald, didn't want to take care of her, she was adopted by a manager at a biscuit corporation and his stay-at-home wife, the latter of whom doesn't know how to relate to Stella and neither of whom ever get close to (or make any real attempt to get close to) her. Thirdly, even knowing how her parents died and acknowledging that they were cocaine addicts throughout her entire childhood, Stella knowingly goes out with a drug dealer called Daniel. Any one of these, I could have bought but all three were just too much. For someone who is supposedly so intelligent, it just doesn't make any sense.
The relationship between Stella and her grandfather, Donald, is too convoluted so what should be a moving final chapter - wherein they decide to commit suicide together, utterly fails in its objective. In fact, I was sitting there thinking "get on with it, already". Partly this is because she has one scene where Donald tries to commit suicide in the shower just before Stella arrives to see him, only to fail. Again, the scene is witty in the dark humour vein, but at the same time, you wonder why he wants to kill himself and never get an answer.
Personally, the character who I was most interested in was Ainsley, the underachiever friend of Ashley who's tolerated as a convenient mate rather than liked in her own right. Seigel made her an effortlessly believable creation - the girl who traces in art class and slips underneath everyone's radar, who even her mother pushes aside in favour of her 'friend' Ashley and yet the person who wrote the speech chosen for the graduation ceremony. I was pleased that Seigel gave her a more hopeful future and would have liked to have seen her play a more active part in the narrative.
The final point that I wanted to make was that Seigel writes the book in the first person but uses a conceit of having Stella write down her thoughts of the last two weeks as a kind of memorium diary, which people can read after she kills herself. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but there were times when I got the feeling she forgot about what the purpose was and also, it raises more credibility issues because Stella's memory of complicated events is so perfect (we're told she's got a photographic memory, but whatever).
The Verdict:
It's well-written, has some good black humour but for me failed by having an implausible central character, with too many contrivances driving the plot. That said, I would definitely be interested in reading more of what Ms Seigel has to offer as the voice is strong and confident.