Pure

A British debut novel, penned by a (then) 16-year-old author, offers the intense immediacy of teenage youth--though often without the forward momentum and richness of texture of a fully accomplished work.The unnamed narrator is a 14-year-old girl who describes, in detail at times biting and at others long-winded, the travails of teenage life in a coastal English town. A bit awkward when she begins school, she learns how to fit in with the cool kids by letting the boys stick their hands up her skirt during break. Soon she has a clique of friends and a mean-spirited, acne-covered boyfriend named Robin, whom she meets for lunch to smoke pot and roll around on the grass with. Slowly her real psyche is revealed when Robin begins to hit her: she likes it, or, more accurately, craves the extreme sensation to feel alive. So begins the narrator's masochism. When Robin falls in love with her, she pushes away his gentleness and begins dating 31-year-old Oliver. More interesting, though, than her romantic relationships are her familial ones--with her loving if volatile father and silent mother, left-wingers who have slipped into a life of disillusionment and endless arguing. Her parents' fighting, the increasingly violent relationship with Oliver, and her gradual withdrawal from school life set the stage for self-mutilation as she cuts herself repeatedly--another desperate act for some kind of cold comfort. While the speaker provides a bleak, honest assessment of youthful angst, too much, given all that happens, is left unsaid or unexplained: her parents' acceptance of a grown man sleeping with their daughter (in their house); her largely undisclosed relationships with friends; and, most importantly, the lack of self-reflection on the teller's part.Graphic and guileless, as well as underdeveloped, though admittedly intriguing if only because of the author's youth. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up." Thus the reader is catapulted directly into the conflicted world of a smalltown English schoolgirl in 20-year-old Ray's relentlessly driven debut novel (she left school at 16 to write it). The narrator (whose name is never given) lives with her constantly bickering hippie vegetarian parents and her younger brother. Her self-pitying, feckless father obsesses over her homework, friends and clothes, and enlists her aid in belittling and disparaging her mother. When she reaches high school, the narrator desperately wants to join the in-crowd. She's in luck when she starts dating Robin, who is part of the popular group. Soon she abandons her former, less cool friends and spends lunch hours "snogging" with Robin. Strangely, Robin's touch does not appeal to the narrator until he hits her and she experiences her first sexual response. Robin loses his masochistic appeal when he says that he loves her, and the narrator moves on to Oliver, a 27-year-old consumer electronics salesman. Oliver's rough treatment proves orgasmic; his escalating violence releases her impulses toward self-mutilation. The narrator's befogged passivity (evidenced by her constant repetition of the phrase "I wondered") and her fascination with the sordidness of the physical side of life (a favorite word is "disgusted") make her mind a somewhat claustrophobic place to be, while her eventual insights into her family dysfunction will seem dated to those who grew up with Catcher in the Rye. However, the novel's structureAshort segments, no chapters and zingy clinchersAmoves this compelling story along swiftly to a surprising conclusion. The narration is leavened with touches of deadpan humor and spot-on observations that add credibility and demonstrate Ray's promise as a writer, despite some evidence of immaturity in her craft. Agent, Patrick Walsh.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This raw debut by precocious British 20-year-old Ray deftly chronicles a girl's painful transition to young adulthood. With the brutally frank opening line, "I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up," it's clear that the narrator lacks both judgment and self-esteem, if not sexual experience. Ray does such an insightful job of showing the descent from embarrassed schoolgirl to confused lover of a much older man that you wonder whether this story is autobiographical--and, if so, how the author lived to tell it with such strength. Particularly poignant are scenes involving a jealous childhood friend, those with the narrator's bitter father, and one about her first experience snorting speed, which leads to terrible self-mutilation with a razor blade. Obscenity-laden and distressing, Pure is not for the easily offended or for those who would rather forget their entire adolescence. It is, however, powerful. Recommended for all libraries.
-Christine Perkins, Medford Teen Lib., Jackson Cty. Lib. Syst., OR
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If you harbor illusions of idyllic childhood spent in blissful ignorance of today's problems, this book will be a disturbing wake-up call. The 14-year-old narrator smokes pot at lunch and lets boys feel her up because she knows they wouldn't hang out with her otherwise. Longing to be friends with the "in crowd," yet too thoughtful to ditch her longtime, best friend, a loser, she straddles different worlds. She discovers the pain-as-pleasure concept, first through a perverse relationship with a man seventeen years her senior, then by taking razor blades to her skin. Her parents, so caught up in their own bickering, never notice the cutting. Her narration reveals that she is wise beyond her years, while her methods of dealing with the horror that is her life are terribly naive and childlike. The writing, by a 16-year-old-girl who took a year off from school to finish it, will amaze, while the story will disturb. This first novel generated both controversy and acclaim upon its initial publication in Britain. Ellie Barta-Moran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved