Hello Life - Softcover

Koenig, Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569473919 ISBN 13: 9781569473917

Publisher: Soho Press, 2005

Synopsis

"In Hello Life, Andrea Koenig has created two enchanting characters who have that singular characteristic of literary art: They are at once utterly unique and resonantly universal. We follow Gwen and Lila in their search for self and learn much about ourselves. This is a book rich in story and brimming with humanity."-Robert Olen Butler

Gwen is newly motherless and of high school age. She needs help. She moves in with Mrs. Parker and another teenage girl she's looking after, Lila Abernathy-"Leukemia Girl." Lila's problem is cancer; Gwen's is pregnancy. Her 37-year-old boyfriend spends most of his time smoking pot in the van that doubles as his home, and his routine hasn't changed since he knocked her up. Gwen is facing life fast. She has to.

Hello Life is utterly satisfying, a book you fall into like a comfortable bed. It is blissful to read something so engaging, so heartfelt and hardheaded, recounting the contentious but strong bond that develops between two waifs. They quarrel and bicker to divert attention from their real troubles of abiding loneliness and rootlessness. Gwen has an urgent feeling that she had better grow up quickly, given her situation, and Lila must grow up quickly because she might simply not have much life left. Gwen is sloppy and sexual, Lila, orderly and finicky. But different as they are, what they individually face connects them far more than their differences. What they're confronting is life unbuffered, and it's smacked them right in the kisser.

Andrea Koenig is the author of a novel, Thumbelina, published by Scribner in the United States and Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. She makes her home in Tulsa.

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Koenig is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. In 1996 she received a Fullbright award to Northern Ireland. Ms. Koenig has an MFA from Syracuse and is the author of one previous novel, Thumbelina, published by Scribner in 1999. She makes her home in Tulsa.

Reviews

Koenig chronicles the hard-knocks lives and unlikely friendship of two 16-year-old girls in her uneven new novel, set in a "dreary little mill town" in the Pacific Northwest. Thrown together in foster care, lippy Gwen Pérez, who recently lost her mother, and prissy Lila Abernathy, a ballerina in remission from leukemia, clash and bond. Gwen loves horses and has a secret crush on Dennis, the popular boy who talks to her so she'll do him favors in math class, but Koenig saddles her with more hardship than her mother's death: she becomes sexually active with and pregnant by her absent father's pot-smoking, nearly 40-year-old friend. Koenig propels the tale with punchy, movie-style dialogue that doesn't seem to fit in the mouths of troubled teenagers, and Gwen's narration of the story lacks a consistent tone. The novel's setup might make for inspirational juvenile fiction, in which hardship somehow strengthens the protagonists, but for adult readers the candy-store realism may disappoint.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1569473919
• ISBN 13: 9781569473917
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272