“The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia’s dark and seething underbelly, she had found the potbelly of contentment.”
And I think that pulled punch — the undelivered promise of quirk — is a mixed blessing for Wild Abandon. Because, really, the book winds up being much more a matter of a coming-of-age, rather like The Fallback Plan (but with a rather more age-appropriate seventeen-year-old having her epiphanies and moments of growth): she may come out of communal living, but her story’s got broadly conventional lines. The quirk, ultimately, just makes for a diverting and brightly colored background for a well-executed but much less unconventional story. With a pretty great zombie-apocalypse set piece at the end.
And I think that pulled punch — the undelivered promise of quirk — is a mixed blessing for Wild Abandon. Because, really, the book winds up being much more a matter of a coming-of-age, rather like The Fallback Plan (but with a rather more age-appropriate seventeen-year-old having her epiphanies and moments of growth): she may come out of communal living, but her story’s got broadly conventional lines. The quirk, ultimately, just makes for a diverting and brightly colored background for a well-executed but much less unconventional story. With a pretty great zombie-apocalypse set piece at the end.
January 11, 2012, 11:00am Comments
