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"Smack" by Melvin Burgess
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From: Kathleen Horning <horning>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 14:10:14 -0500
John, thanks for sharing your insights as a reviewer and one of the first U.S. readers of "Smack."
I read "Smack" last year in its original English edition, after having read about it on Michael Thorn's great web page ACHUKA
(http://www.webplus.co.uk/~achuka/). I must confess that the controversy he described there aroused my curiosity and I couldn't wait to read it. I had to track down a British edition, because it had not yet been published in the U.S.
What surprised me when I started reading it was how funny it was! There's lots of humor in it that made me chuckle aloud as I was reading it. I also admired Burgess's skill at presenting a story from multiple view points, the way in which he builds character internally and externally.
To any of you who think you wouldn't like reading a novel about teen heroin addicts, I say: give this book a try. It may surprise you.
Kathleen T. Horning (khorning at facstaff.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education University of Wisconsin-Madison
Friends, I was granted the privilege of drafting the Kirkus review for this way back in January, and can still clearly recall (no common occurrence for this highly decorated member of the Short Attention Span Corps) the growing horror I felt as the story went on--not horror as a reader or reviewer, but as an observer of what was happening to these young people. If that's not great storytelling, then what is? Even more astonishing, not only does Burgess defy the conventional wisdom that young readers have to be grabbed on page one, he doesn't really start to exploit his subject's shock value until the damage has been done (heroin isn't even mentioned until galley page 149, prostitution until 184, etc), and the most disturbing scenes are presented with the same casual offhandedness that colors the book's early events, when Tar and Gemma more or less consider themselves off on a lark. The drug doesn't overwhelm everyone like a tsunami, it overwhelms them like a poison gas, seeping through the cracks in their characters and way of life.
Thinking about the book as a reviewer, I did wonder whether the afterword, about squatting, was really necessary. Was it in the original edition, or added for Americans? Of all the things in the book that are going to bother people, that seemed one of the minor ones. Of course, since I worked in the south Bronx for several years back in the '80's, the idea isn't particularly alien.
Find and read this book! You will/won't be sorry.
John Peters New York Public Library cf071 at freenet.buffalo.edu
***My esteemed institution asserts its right to cut me off at any level it deems fit***
Received on Tue 02 Jun 1998 02:10:14 PM CDT
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 14:10:14 -0500
John, thanks for sharing your insights as a reviewer and one of the first U.S. readers of "Smack."
I read "Smack" last year in its original English edition, after having read about it on Michael Thorn's great web page ACHUKA
(http://www.webplus.co.uk/~achuka/). I must confess that the controversy he described there aroused my curiosity and I couldn't wait to read it. I had to track down a British edition, because it had not yet been published in the U.S.
What surprised me when I started reading it was how funny it was! There's lots of humor in it that made me chuckle aloud as I was reading it. I also admired Burgess's skill at presenting a story from multiple view points, the way in which he builds character internally and externally.
To any of you who think you wouldn't like reading a novel about teen heroin addicts, I say: give this book a try. It may surprise you.
Kathleen T. Horning (khorning at facstaff.wisc.edu) Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education University of Wisconsin-Madison
Friends, I was granted the privilege of drafting the Kirkus review for this way back in January, and can still clearly recall (no common occurrence for this highly decorated member of the Short Attention Span Corps) the growing horror I felt as the story went on--not horror as a reader or reviewer, but as an observer of what was happening to these young people. If that's not great storytelling, then what is? Even more astonishing, not only does Burgess defy the conventional wisdom that young readers have to be grabbed on page one, he doesn't really start to exploit his subject's shock value until the damage has been done (heroin isn't even mentioned until galley page 149, prostitution until 184, etc), and the most disturbing scenes are presented with the same casual offhandedness that colors the book's early events, when Tar and Gemma more or less consider themselves off on a lark. The drug doesn't overwhelm everyone like a tsunami, it overwhelms them like a poison gas, seeping through the cracks in their characters and way of life.
Thinking about the book as a reviewer, I did wonder whether the afterword, about squatting, was really necessary. Was it in the original edition, or added for Americans? Of all the things in the book that are going to bother people, that seemed one of the minor ones. Of course, since I worked in the south Bronx for several years back in the '80's, the idea isn't particularly alien.
Find and read this book! You will/won't be sorry.
John Peters New York Public Library cf071 at freenet.buffalo.edu
***My esteemed institution asserts its right to cut me off at any level it deems fit***
Received on Tue 02 Jun 1998 02:10:14 PM CDT
