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Mathilda Savitch (2009)

by Victor Lodato(Favorite Author)

3.15 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0374204004 (ISBN13: 9780374204006)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: Mathilda Savitch is 13 and has a much tougher life than most teenagers. Unpopular at school, she also has to contend with being ignored by her parents, who are too busy grieving over the death of her sister the previous year to give her the attention she deserves. Instead she’s trying to get that from her best friend Anna, on whom she has a major crush, and the boy next door, Kevin, who has blue hair. On top of that, she’s trying to crack her sister’s email password so she can find out more about why she died and at whose hands. This might sound like a young adult novel but it isn’t. Mathilda is quite clever and a bit mad and, in the hands of well-known American playwright Victor Lodato, she’s delivered alive and kicking as a tortured adolescent struggling with s... morechool, terrorism, sex, death, an alcoholic mother and a spineless (if you ask me) father. As I read it, which I did in one hit, I found it so compelling, I was reminded of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and also of a 1997 movie called The Ice Storm, which was based on the novel of the same name by theamazing Rick Moody. You know that Mathilda Savitch and her broken family can’t keep going on the way they are – that at some point grief has to give way to something more hopeful if the living are to stay that way. It’s just a matter of what exactly is going to stop the downward spiral – and where the broken-hearted survivors are going to go from there. Charming and laced with bittersweet humour.
review 2: For a book I found at the Dollar Tree, it was worth the forty-five minutes I read it. I stopped after the 60th-or-so page because the writing by Lodato had dilapidated by the 40th. I was trying to give the novel a chance, but the author made these references to things, trying to get meaningfulness into his novel, that didn't really fit the book. No plot then, just background information about Savitch, the titular character. Overall, the novel, from what i could stand of it, was a poor performance, and I don't expect a sequel. less

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