The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

June 2, 2014
In a faux biography of a deceased teenage rising star in the art world, Griffin (Loud Awake and Lost) builds a novel around interviews from people involved in Addison’s life before she died, excerpts from media coverage of her rapidly growing fame, photographs of Addison and her friends, and images of her artwork. The myriad voices include her friends and neighbors from back home in Rhode Island, the teachers who helped engineer her success, the boys she became involved with, the hard-partying crowd she ran with in New York City, her high-powered art dealer, and the psychiatrist who prescribed her antipsychotic medication. As they recount how talented, beautiful, cruel, difficult, or tragic Addison was in life, they often reveal their own insecurities, arrogance, ulterior motives, and desire to share Addison’s fame. Griffin offers incisive commentary on mental illness and the frenzy around (and pressures induced by) celebrity, especially surrounding young women. Defined primarily by the contradictory accounts of those around her, Addison remains something of a cipher even by book’s end. Ages 14–up. Agent: Emily Van Beek, Folio Literary Management. (Aug.)■

June 15, 2014
Why did an 18-year-old artist fall from an overpass in New York City in the middle of the night?This "investigative" novel reveals the back story to Addison's meteoric rise from small-town life to the art world's it girl. Griffin is a character in her own novel as a reporter intent on getting to the bottom of the artist's death. Addy had always shown a raw talent mixed with a magnetic personality that repelled people as often as it drew them to her. Haunted by voices, on anti-psychotic drugs after attempting suicide, Addy jumped at the chance to attend art school in New York when a video of her swinging from a chandelier, "drunk on fear," went viral. Swept up in a frenzy of activity, in and out of love, she somehow found time to showcase her creative genius. Snippets of interviews sprinkled with color photographs and paintings form a portrait of a sassy and troubled young woman. The novel's effectiveness as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the shallowness of contemporary cultural life is undermined by an overreliance on stereotypes: the philandering father, clueless mother, aggressive agent, gay roommate, and most gratuitous of all, the family's Hawaiian neighbors, who ask their shaman to perform a ritual of harmonic healing, recognizing that the "spirit here's been troubled for a real long time."An interesting but ultimately unsatisfying experiment in form. (Fiction. 14 & up)

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2014

Gr 8 Up-Everyone knows who Addison Stone was, even if they didn't know anything about her. Addy was a small-town girl with dreams of artistic immortality. Her talent was incredible, and she landed an agent almost the moment she set foot in New York at the age of 17. Soon her life became a whirlwind of parties, love affairs, and bursts of creativity. But Addison was keeping secrets, and burning too brightly. It seems, looking back, that her life was destined to end early, and tragically. This fictional biography of a visual and performance artist Addison Stone is compelling and tragic from the very first page. Griffin tells the teen's story through compiled interview excerpts from those who knew, loved, and hated her. The media, which include texts to and from her friends, paint a picture of a brilliant artist full of life and potential, but also reveal the young woman's unbalanced mental state and her loved ones' concern. Interspersed are photos and reproductions of the protagonist's artwork, magazine covers and articles, and interviews with Addison herself for various publications, layering level upon level of reality to the story. Readers will be fascinated with the novel and caught up in the drama right up to the end.-Heather Miller Cover, Homewood Public Library, AL

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* The coverfeaturing a photographic negative of a girl with a red X on itsays below the title, A Novel. But readers can't be blamed if they assume this is the story of a real girl whose art ethos led to a tumultuous life and a mysterious death. Griffin, a two-time National Book Award finalist and one of the best YA authors around, attempts something very different here: a Rashomon-like take on a young girl's life, highlighted by photos of the girl and her art, all in an attempt to put the unknowable Addison more within the reader's grasp. But are there so many Addisons (or at least so many divergent voices who contribute their version of Addison) that trying to re-create her is a futile task? The conceit is this: 17-year-old Addison Stone, portraitist and performance artist, has died, falling off a scaffold as she she tried to place a billboard on the Manhattan Bridge overpass. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? An author, named Adele Griffin, who briefly taught Stone in a writing class, decides to write a book about the wild child who took New York by storm. She interviews dozens of those closest to the young artistfamily, friends, mentors, boyfriendsto learn who Addison was and why she died. To bring the story closer, the book uses photos of real-life model Giza Lagarce as Addison (see above), and the pictures do mirror the text, capturing a young woman, sensual and brooding. In addition, three young artists from the Rhode Island School of Design were commissioned to create renditions of Addison's artwork at various stages, all of which adds authenticity to the story. But it is the recollections that truly bring Addison alive. One after another, they remember: the parents who didn't understand, the best friend who did, a first boyfriend. Their contradictions only add to the richness of the portrait. Exceptionally insightful is well-off cousin Madison. When Allison changes her name to Addison, Madison understands it's Addison's way of both taking away from Maddy and adding to herself, grabbing some of what she feels she lacks in her own life. It's Madison, too, who was there for the appearance of the ghosts who worked their way inside Addison's brain. Manifestations of the schizophrenia Addison was to develop or something supernatural? After Addison gets to New York, a telling familiarity sets in. The rich boyfriend, the art dealer who has his own interests at heart. Then, a more serious boy, another artist, who understands he's out of his depth with her. This is the part of the story that Griffin gets so right: a shining star gives off light, but it's impossible to bottle. People try to understand, to help, to save, but a mercurial personality, especially one as driven as Addison, doesn't know what she needs, making the helpers ultimately helpless. There are parts of this book that distract from rather than build the narrative. The cause of Addison's death seems more a red herring than a true mystery. And, at times, ironically, the visuals get in the way of the story. For instance, though much of of the art shown is solid, even occasionally startling, some of it just seems, well, average. As do the images of Addison's last boyfriend, who is described much more intriguingly in words than in pictures. This novel is, however, a terrific experiment, something fresh and hard to put down. It gives a sense of both the artistic temperament and the nature of madnessand the sometimes thin line in between.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)