Looks by Madeleine George
| Looks by Madeleine George | |
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| Category: Teens | |
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Reviewer: Jill Murphy
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| Summary: Super debut novel about body image and the cruelty of school society. Expressive but harsh, it perfectly captures a sense of alienation and otherness, but the style occasionally lapses into a slightly self-conscious pretension. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 240 | Date: June 2008 |
| Publisher: Viking | |
| ISBN: 0142414190 | |
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Meghan is fat. It's not puppy fat. She's huge. She knows she's huge. Everyone at school knows she's huge. But somehow, because being so fat makes her so unwanted in school society, she's also invisible. Despite being excluded from the usual gossipy chatter, Meghan probably knows more secrets than any other pupil. People talk in front of her because they don't see her. She simply doesn't count. When the secrets aren't enough, Meghan feigns illness to get out of class, or hides away bingeing on chocolate.
Aimee is thin. She's painfully angular. Smarting from her mother's break up with a boyfriend Aimee idolised, Aimee's decided that if she can't control relationships, she can control food. She has pyschological allergies to almost all food except green Jell-O and carrot sticks. Aimee isn't interested in other people's secrets; she's interested in her own, and how she can express them through her poems.
Aside from opposite spectrum eating disorders, there isn't much to connect these two girls... until they discover a share nemesis in one particularly bitchy fellow pupil.
The back cover blurb for Look calls it a searing debut novel. And it is. Alienation and otherness pervade every page. Many adolescent psychological problems, not just eating disorders, are characterised by an overpowering sense of anomie and George describes it with savage accuracy. There's a huge barrier between both Aimee and Meghan and the rest of the world and the reader sees this through a detached, third person, present tense narrator. As the two girls observe themselves and those around them and we observe them doing it, we're forced to ask just how much of it is through a glass darkly.
It makes for an honest, sometimes harsh, sometimes heart-breaking read. Of course, using such a style to explain dislocation whilst maintaining a connection with the reader is a delicate balancing act and once or twice George takes it too far and lapses into self-conscious pretension for a paragraph or two. But these moments are few and far between in what is an arresting and thought-provoking book.
My thanks to the nice people at Viking for sending the book.
Teen readers could also look at How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. Younger readers might like A Perfect Ten by Chris Higgins.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Looks by Madeleine George at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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