END OVER END
Kate Kennedy, END OVER ENDKate Kennedy
Ivory Towle is a dreamy, other-worldly 14-year-old growing up in a blue-collar town in New Hampshire. Artistic and bored, she is in love with Blake, a beautiful boy who abuses her, and she may or may not be pregnant with his child. Five months later, the badly decomposed remains of her shot and stabbed body are found by a curious dog in a wooded area just outside the town center. But this isn't a whodunit—we never find out who is responsible for the crime. Instead, Kennedy inverts the conventions of the genre and successfully refocuses attention on the culture that made the girl's death possible. Point of view shifts rapidly from character to character, among them: Ivory's parents, paralyzed into passivity by their grief and by the inhumanity of the system they're expected to trust; Mrs. Cadenza, the well-intentioned health teacher who cannot reach her students; Sally Gregg, the compassionate cop who views Ivory's murder through the filter of her own personal tragedy; Tommy Slack, one of the rage-filled, misdirected boys accused of the crime; and Ivory's girlfriends, who, as lost as they are, continue to suspect that there's something better out there for them. Kennedy's portrait of poor, suburban youth culture is pitch-perfect and devastating in its implications, and her prose is so beautiful that the apparent lack of focus hardly seems to matter. She reveals a world of teen pregnancies, drugs, shrugged-off rape, suicide attempts and careless violence, of which Ivory's death is only a part. "It makes you tired, holding a future in your own two hands," Ivory says, and Kennedy leaves us to wonder if this waste is not, in fact, the final tragedy. (Apr.)
closeDetailsReviewed on: 03/05/2001
Genre: Fiction
Paperback - 320 pages - 978-1-56947-276-7
Ivory Towle is a dreamy, other-worldly 14-year-old growing up in a blue-collar town in New Hampshire. Artistic and bored, she is in love with Blake, a beautiful boy who abuses her, and she may or may not be pregnant with his child. Five months later, the badly decomposed remains of her shot and stabbed body are found by a curious dog in a wooded area just outside the town center. But this isn't a whodunit—we never find out who is responsible for the crime. Instead, Kennedy inverts the conventions of the genre and successfully refocuses attention on the culture that made the girl's death possible. Point of view shifts rapidly from character to character, among them: Ivory's parents, paralyzed into passivity by their grief and by the inhumanity of the system they're expected to trust; Mrs. Cadenza, the well-intentioned health teacher who cannot reach her students; Sally Gregg, the compassionate cop who views Ivory's murder through the filter of her own personal tragedy; Tommy Slack, one of the rage-filled, misdirected boys accused of the crime; and Ivory's girlfriends, who, as lost as they are, continue to suspect that there's something better out there for them. Kennedy's portrait of poor, suburban youth culture is pitch-perfect and devastating in its implications, and her prose is so beautiful that the apparent lack of focus hardly seems to matter. She reveals a world of teen pregnancies, drugs, shrugged-off rape, suicide attempts and careless violence, of which Ivory's death is only a part. "It makes you tired, holding a future in your own two hands," Ivory says, and Kennedy leaves us to wonder if this waste is not, in fact, the final tragedy.
Reviewed on: 03/05/2001
Genre: Fiction
Paperback - 320 pages - 978-1-56947-276-7
