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Dora: A Headcase (2012)

by Lidia Yuknavitch(Favorite Author)

3.64 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0983477574 (ISBN13: 9780983477570)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Hawthorne Books

review 1: Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora: A Headcase mirrors themes and takes dialogue verbatim from Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmeund Freud. I haven't read the latter, so my commentary on the intertextuality will be mostly nonexistent,mexcept to say the Freud is a character in the book (as well as Jung) and psychoanalysis is a major theme of the novel. This book is punk as fuck. It is tied up in the loose rhythmns of a teenage girl's disastrous life, and the emotional fallout of her family's wreckage and her psychological reactions to that, and how she is saved the safety net of her friends, each who is as much of a societal outcast and has as many emotional difficulties as she does. This book is all style, teenage swagger, vocab and syntax, and as another reviewer put i... moret: if you don't like the voice Yuknavitch establishes for our narrator, you're not going to like the text. It ties up a bit too neatly for me, betraying its punk aesthetics with a primer on the happy times our characters succumb to, but other than these minor faults it is a blistering read.
review 2: I wanted to like this book. As a concept, I think it's great - like a young adult spin on the idea Jean Rhys uses in Wide Saragasso Sea. This book is contemporary, with queer characters, and challenging psychiatry's great patriarch. Sounds awesome. However, it's got Chuck Palahniuk's love of the grotesque and shocking all over it. If you like Palahniuk (and I definitely don't), that's one thing, but here it comes off as transparent. It comes off as trying too hard. The authors use of slang in an attempt to sound young also leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, the continual use of the word "tranny" was completely unnecessary and ignorant. The racist undertones regarding the character of Obsidian (her ethnicity being eroticized, she being the "angry indigenous girl") was disgusting. This character was basically a stereotype, as well as the trans* character. Very, very, transphobic and racist. I'm not sure why I continued on to the end of this book. I wouldn't recommend anyone do the same, unless they want to be left feeling angry and disgusted. less

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