TITLE:
ALL THE WAY
AUTHOR:
MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ
Pages:
284
Date:
26/02/2014
Grade:
3.5
Details:
Received from Text Publishing
Through Nudge
Own
Some
books are harder to review than others and ‘All the Way’ certainly falls in the
harder category.
This
is the story of Solange’s sexual coming of age. It is told in three parts and
while you might think that it gets easier to read about her dreams, fantasies
and actions as she gets older, it didn’t quite work that way for me. In fact,
there was a lot in this story that really disturbed me. That is significant
because I read a lot of erotic books covering a range of topics and rarely find
myself wanting to look away from what the author is trying to show me.
Solange’s
story is told in three parts: Getting It, Doing It and Doing It Again and
follows her from age 10 until a few, unspecified number of, years later.
Solange is the daughter of a father she hero worships but who is rarely around
and appears to be having affairs. Solange isn’t really aware of her father’s
escapades although his behaviour does manage to embarrass her at times. The
girl’s mother doesn’t seem to play an active role in Solange’s life. She is
around but appears to be suffering from depression and migraines; something
that appears to be connected to the photo of a young boy she keeps on her
bedside table. With her parents being less than present in her life, much of
Solange’s care is left to a neighbour, Monsieur Bihotz.
The
reader follows Solange as her body and her interests change. She evolves from
an innocent and happy young girl into a sex obsessed teenager with little to no
guidance and guessing her way through discoveries and experiences. Everything
the girl thinks she knows has either been found in an encyclopaedia or picked
up from girlfriend gossip and neither can protect her or those around her from
the devastation her transition will cause.
This
book managed to disturb me on several levels. In the first part of the story
the interactions between Solange and Monsieur Bihotz gave me the creeps. While
it is never suggested that the man abuses Solange, the descriptions of him
tucking her into her bed and, especially, the fact that the young girl can
describe his penis in various states of arousal really got to me.
“He
has two dicks. The one for pissing and the other one. The other one is much
bigger, the colour of a turkey’s comb, like the canna lilies.”
In
the two subsequent parts of the story Solange is a few years older, although
the reader is never told exactly how old, and throws herself head first into a
sex obsessed world. It was her desperation to experience everything as soon as
possible that really got to me. On the one hand I was very impressed with the
descriptions of all the insecurities teenagers go through when it comes to
relationships and intimacy. On the other hand the way she throws herself into
everything is so far beyond my level of experience that it shocked me to the
core. It might have been easier if Solange’s age in those later years had been
specified. Because the reader is only told she is a few years older than 10 it
is up to them to imagine whether she is say, 13, 15 or 17. The fact that
everything described in this book might have been happening to a girl aged only
14 made this a hard read.
Having
said all of that, there were a few things I really admired about this book. The
story is told in a rather fragmented fashion, jumping from thought to thought.
Of course, that is exactly the way the teenage mind works and while it made the
story a bit hard to follow at times, it also meant that the reader never had
the opportunity to forget that they were living inside a teenage mind. The
selfishness of teenagers and their capacity to make everything that happens
about them was brilliantly portrayed, even if it made Solange a very hard
character to like on occasion. I was also really impressed with some of the
descriptions of Solange’s changing body.
“Her
nipples feel like they’re on fire. As if two eyes were opening in her chest,
agonizing, blind and exposed to scrutiny.”
Just
as there were one or two times when her emotions struck a chord.
“Oh,
to be a child again. When she was little, the external world didn’t seem to
weigh so heavily on the surface of her being.”
Maybe
this was such a hard book to read because it is too realistic. It brought back
memories of all the insecurities, confusing longings and pitfalls of adolescence
with too much clarity. Some of Solange’s thoughts and experiences were so
recognisable they might have been written about me. That combined with the fact
that a lot of what she actually experiences goes way beyond anything I
encountered during that time in my life may well explain why I feel so
ambivalent about this book. One thing I do know for sure is that I’m happy I
don’t have a teenage daughter living at home. I think this story would give any
parent of a teenage daughter nightmares – even a mother who was kind of wild at
that age herself.
Over
all I would call this a very explicit, at times shocking, coming of age story
written by an author who has an exceptional insight into the teenage mind. The
writing in this book is brutally honest and at times poetically beautiful. This
is the sort of book that will shock and disturb many because it shows us a part
of the teenage experience we would rather deny. I defy anybody to read this
book and not walk away from it with strong feelings. Whether those feelings are
positive or negative very much depends on the sensibilities of the reader in
question. This reader finds herself both impressed and disturbed.
