Heatwave

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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. We meet 17-year-old Leo near the end of a lengthy summer holiday he’s spending with his parents and younger siblings at a well-appointed campground in France. At its worst, it gets two-dimensional and repetitive, descriptive on the surface but limited in scope.

It started out as one kid grappling with the burden of watching another kid die - then did a major detour for most of the other 100 pages whilst Leonard and every other kid had nothing but sex in their heads - and then I was supposed to care again right at the end when the author decided he had to tie up the narrative for the dead kid. Over the next 24 hours, Leo wanders around the campsite like a sleepwalker, haunted by guilt and fear. I could almost feel the intense heat, and thus I could empathize with the protagonist's apathy caused by the heat.

Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. A prizewinning sensation in France and now stunningly translated by Sam Taylor, Heatwave is Victor Jestin's ';charged and chilling' ( Publishers Weekly) debut novela searing portrait of adolescent desire and recklessness, and secrets too big to keep. Luckily, it was a Buddy Read with my GR pal, John, so we were able to have some good e-chats about it.

Instead of creating a persona of a misunderstood teen who is struggling with his peers and how to progress in the world, we're presented with a disjointed representation of a teenage cliche that was at times just really hard to accept. There is a teen protagonist - Leonard - who finds himself in a sticky spot after witnessing another boy die whilst on a dreaded camping holiday with his family. Awkward and ill at ease, he is an outsider who creeps away from parties unnoticed after a couple of drinks. It also comments on societal pressure to conform and, on the other side of the spectrum, questions the artificial nature of people’s behaviour, their superficiality and their ability to ignore the issues they don’t want to deal with.The reviews by some saying that it's a challenger to Salinger's 'Catcher In The Rye' is somewhat insulting. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.

Jestin is extremely good on precisely those sensations so indelibly associated with fraught teen summers, be it Leonard’s obscure feelings of separation from his perfectly pleasant family, the forced bonhomie of those running the campsite or the blistering heat that seeps like an illness under the skin . The brief scene seemed to open up a potentially interesting direction for this short story, but unfortunately things move on and it is quickly forgotten.Victor Jestin succeeds in transporting us with almost nothing, this unique style, this voice—one might almost say these whispers.