Not the End of the World - Hardcover

Stowe, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0720608147 ISBN 13: 9780720608144

Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

Some superficial scoring on jacket, with light wear on all edges and further creasing on lower rear including a tear approx 1in by corner. Leading corners slightly bent on jacket and hardcover. Spine bumped head and foot on jacket and hardcover; light stain at bottom of front board; minor grubby marks in a few places on jacket and page block. Crease on front pastedown; dirty mark down rear pastedown. Despite exterior wear the pages are clean and bright, binding sound, and content clear throughout. TS

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

An angry young girl struggles to grow up in `60s suburbia--in this flawed but still intriguing tragicomic debut, first published in England, by a New York writer. Maggie Pittsfield, 12, is by all accounts a lucky young girl. Daughter of amiable candymaker Robert ``Sweet is My Middle Name'' Pittsfield, Maggie lives with her family in beautiful Port Huron, Michigan, where the shore of the great lake lies in her own backyard, she has her own room and her own dog, and her beautiful, self-abnegating mother is at her beck and call. Nevertheless, Maggie is a difficult child--as her exceedingly critical grandmother is fond of pointing out--who, when she's not threatening to desert her neurotic younger sister, is playing serious games of doctor with a girlfriend in the nearby woods. While her parents argue ineffectually over whether something is terribly wrong with the girl, Maggie struggles through a deadly boring session of summer school imposed as punishment for her scandalous conduct the previous semester. What the scandal involved is the central mystery in this tale of secrets denied and horror suppressed. Maggie herself is too busy trying to control the separate personalities that she imagines are fighting for dominance within her (Katrina, the adopted child; Trixie, the mischievous girl; Sarah, the good daughter; Peggy, the terrified infant, and so on) and evading her school counselor's probing questions to take the lid off the searing truth that all this activity is meant to hide. That Maggie's secret has to do with half-forgotten sexual abuse comes as no surprise--beneath its hard-edged frenzy, this story reads like a textbook case. Nevertheless, the author's uncompromising, forceful style keeps the pages turning. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Already published in Great Britain, this often harrowing first novel by an American has been compared to Catcher in the Rye , most likely because narrator Maggie Pittsfield, 12 years old in the early '60s, shares Holden Caulfield's extraordinary discomfort with adult society--and his equally extraordinary ease in expressing it. But Maggie is angrier and in even greater pain than is Salinger's character, and her tale more particular. Although her affluent family tells her that she is the "luckiest girl in North Bay," she's experienced so much trauma that she claims six different personalities ("It wasn't craziness-- The Six Faces of Maggie or anything like that--I didn't black out and then wake up dancing naked on a pool table. . . I was perfectly aware of all the parts and I knew when they were going to take over: there just wasn't anything I could do about it"), and most of them are unforgiving. Readers familiar with such pop presentations of child abuse as the TV film Sybil will easily spot the clues to Maggie's distressing secrets; the challenge in this book is not to anticipate the narrator's revelations but to appreciate the completeness of her voice. Stowe never soft pedals Maggie, and the reader's uneasiness with this sharp character paradoxically testifies to the integrity of her achievement.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0720608147
• ISBN 13: 9780720608144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152