The Patterns of Paper Monsters - Softcover

Rathbone, Emma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031607750X ISBN 13: 9780316077507

Publisher: Reagan Arthur / Back Bay Books, 2010

Synopsis

Jacob Higgins's teenage rage rarely simmers below the surface for long. He despises his negligent mother and her alcoholic boyfriend, Refrigerator Man, and he's indifferent to school and his friends -- though a little less casual about girls and marijuana. His antics have landed him in a North Virginia detention center, where nihilism, freedom, and redemption all take on unexpected guises. In a voice filled with confusion, yearning, and sardonic humor, Jacob narrates his improbably sweet romance with Andrea, an inmate with whom he shares rare glances, melodramatic conversation, and waxy cookies at rigidly chaperoned "socials." But when David, a mysterious, conniving adolescent, handpicks him to assist in a plot to bring about the center's demise, Jacob has to weigh the frail new optimism of his relationship with Andrea against the allure of destruction, rebellion, and escape.

In her pitch-perfect debut, Emma Rathbone adroitly captures the drama, both comic and deadly serious, of growing up.

About this title

About the Author

Emma Rathbone is a graduate of New York University and the MFA Fiction Program at the University of Virginia. She currently lives in Charlottesville.

Reviews

A contemporary Holden Caulfield does time in a juvy center in Rathbone's singular debut. Seventeen-year-old Jacob Higgins is three months into his sentence for armed robbery, passing time at a northern Virginia juvenile detention center. Fueled by sarcasm and possible sociopathic tendencies, he endures "Olympic trials of boredom and grudging acquiescence," receives visits from his alcoholic mother, develops a budding romance with a girl he occasionally runs into, and wonders about the diabolical plans of a mysterious boy from an upper-class neighborhood. Rathbone's extraordinary and imaginative command of language surprises at every turn, from a woman described as "a pile of a person who smells like someone's weird house" to an air vent blowing "glacial wind swept up from prehistoric ice dunes." Though laxly plotted and a bit disappointing at the end, the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Napoleon Dynamite sensibility is reason enough to stick with this story of one messed-up kid's ambivalent mosey toward getting it together.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Reagan Arthur / Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031607750X
• ISBN 13: 9780316077507
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206