The House Tibet - Hardcover

Savage, Georgia

4.16

113 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155597144X ISBN 13: 9781555971441

Publisher: Graywolf Pr, 1991

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

When her mother, grandmother, and aunt fail to stop her father's sexually abusive behavior, Vicky runs away from home with her autistic younger brother, James, and joins a band of homeless children in an Australian coastal town

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

The tough, naive voice of thirteen-year-old Morgan, the narrator of The House Tibet, calls for the reader to feel personally responsible for this character's survival from the very first sentence. The story begins with incest: "While it was happening I watched the moon. It was a piece of sky behind his shoulder." Afterwards, Morgan seeks support from her family and is repeatedly rebuffed with a bluntness that is almost as horrifying as the rape itself. When she and her mute younger brother run away and join a band of vagabond kids, her story becomes increasingly surreal as Morgan learns that survival depends upon a combination of ruthless detachment and fierce loyalty. Though Georgia Savage ties up all the loose ends a bit too neatly in the end and occasionally resorts to convenient explanatory dialogue along the way, even her cliches have twists to them. The sharp, ironic turns of thought and plot make this novel and its narrator unforgettable. At one point Morgan herself comments upon the process of telling this story: "I was going to write it as if I had everyone I knew sitting in a circle listening while I told them. I'll put in everything I thought. So they start to understand what it's like being a girl at war ... practically every MINUTE of your life." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom

From Publishers Weekly:

"While it was happening I watched the moon," begins this deeply affecting Australian novel about a 13-year-old girl who is raped by her father. Vicky Ferguson is met with denial, reprobation and evasion when she attempts to share her traumatic secret with grown-ups. So she runs away with her autistic, mute younger brother, James (who will later find his voice), taking a train from Adelaide to a place called Surfers' Paradise on Australia's Gold Coast. There this lost duo plunges into a subculture of plucky street kids. Vicky is at first so naive that she thinks the bordello where she finds work as a laundress is an old hotel, but her affair with a Chinese-Australian boy, her encounters with a lethal politician, a conniving journalist and sundry other characters soon expose her to a world in which few men "have evolved past pack behavior." Luckily, a wizened old man nicknamed Xam (Max spelled backwards), fellow-lodger at a boardinghouse named Tibet, aids her emotional healing. Savage's prose is exquisite, her street-hardened characters are achingly real.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.