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Audiobook3 hours
Innocence
Written by Jane Mendelsohn
Narrated by Emily Schirner
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
An electrifying follow-up to her bestselling I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn's Innocence is a modern gothic coming-of-age story, a devastating X-ray of American culture, and a piercing exploration of a teenage girl growing up in New York City. Narrated with incisive wit by fourteen-year-old Becket, the novel traces her relationship with her widowed father, her encounters with the intimidating Beautiful Girls at school, her attraction to the mysterious and dangerous school nurse, her attachment to the raffish Tobey, and a series of devastating nightmares that threaten Becket's life as she moves from girl to woman.
Mendelsohn has written an allegory about the precarious state of the American teenager in a culture that sucks the life force out of its young, who are nurtured by the movies and fantasy and narcissism rather than by values such as honesty and love. This is a world as startingly original and hauntingly familiar as our dreams, where the line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and insanity, is razor-thin. Playful, frightening, profound, and gripping, Innocence is the rare thing - a page turner with the depth of poetry and the immediacy of cinema.
Mendelsohn has written an allegory about the precarious state of the American teenager in a culture that sucks the life force out of its young, who are nurtured by the movies and fantasy and narcissism rather than by values such as honesty and love. This is a world as startingly original and hauntingly familiar as our dreams, where the line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and insanity, is razor-thin. Playful, frightening, profound, and gripping, Innocence is the rare thing - a page turner with the depth of poetry and the immediacy of cinema.
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Reviews for Innocence
Rating: 3.6666666666666665 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
3 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Innocence by Jane Mendelsohn reads like a YA Rosemary's Baby with a literary twist. Becket is living with her recently widowed father and is coming to terms with going to a new school and hitting puberty. Her school, while an exclusive academy in Manhattan, has a history of suicides, especially among its female students.Told in a stilted first person, Mendelsohn captures Becket's increasingly fragmented thoughts as she is sucked into whatever is causing the rash of suicides. When her father remarries, things get worse and she begins to suspect her step mother.While I'm not normally a fan of punctuation free dialogue, I found it worked here. The book is almost free verse disguised as a prose. With short chapters, short sentences and little in the way of punctuation, I really felt like I was in Becket's head.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Adolescent angst is made much worse when dealing with vampires. In spite of the presence of vampires, this is not a horror novel.