Reviews

The Girl with the Botticelli Face

Geist Staff
Tags

The dust jacket of The Girl with the Botticelli Face (W. D. Valgardson, Douglas & McIntyre) promises an "explicit rendering of sexual politics," a dissection of "the nature of male rage" and even "one of the most hilarious scenes in CanLit." This reviewer never got that far, but stopped after fifty-seven pages that felt like thousands. Male and female characters alike fall flat, knocked down by plain bad writing—a reliance on pathetic clichés and a smarmy humour that left me in need of a shower (hot). The bruised victim of husband-abuse, the (female) high school guidance teacher whose teaching aids include an inflatable rubber penis—"hilarious"? No. There is not a breath of fresh insight here, nor any love of language, nor any wish to grapple passionately with gender politics or any other new ideas. The narrator is a whining dinosaur who has missed every possible learnable moment. Let's call this one a must-avoid.

No items found.

SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Essays
Emily Lu

Love Song for Mosquito

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

Essays
Joseph Pearson

No Names

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

Essays
Christine Lai

Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown