Demi-Gods

August 28, 2017
Robertson’s vivid but somewhat choppy debut novel (following her short story collection, Wallflowers) is set in the 1950s, and moves between a summer cabin on a British Columbia island and California. When nine-year old Willa’s mother’s new lover’s two sons come from California to visit Salt Spring Island, Willa and her sister Joan’s lives are transformed. Joan, 12, is immediately attracted to and later pairs off with the older brother, Kenneth, who is about 15 at the start of the novel, while 11-year old Patrick captivates and sometimes repels Willa. Willa’s attraction to Patrick leads him to wield a special and somewhat sinister power over her, and as they grow up, the sexual tension and silent power struggles engulf not just this pair but also the adults. One of the novel’s strengths is that it doesn’t see teenage sexuality as something to be feared; it beautifully captures the mixture of excitement, enjoyment, and alarm that accompanies discovery and sets it against a series of sunwashed, Instamatic-filtered summers. Robertson’s short fiction has won a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her strengths at that length appear here too: wonderful cinematic detail, precise character observation, and pithy insights into the strong relationship between the two sisters. But novels require something more, and this one falls short of feeling cohesive, with too many characters coming across as shadowy or sketchy. The various episodes, sometimes separated by years, are not convincing enough to work as fragments of a whole. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown.

February 1, 2018
A strange boy from San Diego enters the life of a Canadian girl in 1950 and leaves it in 1961, inspiring a lifelong fascination.Robertson's (Wallflowers, 2014) debut novel is narrated by Willa, who is 9 when her story begins on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. This is when she meets Patrick, one of two brothers who arrive with their father from San Diego for a visit. The father is dating her mother, the older brother and Willa's sister are heading for romance, and she is drawn immediately into the weird, faintly perverted aura of the younger boy, Patrick, who gets her involved in humiliating, painful, and/or frightening episodes every time he appears, variously involving a stinging jellyfish, an eviscerated rabbit, and his genitals. Willa is a Didion-esque narrator, and the novel has a strong memoiristic feel: "Everything I knew of California I learned when I was twelve--the blue desert, Valencia oranges, the smell of hot tires, my sister in an Orlon sweater, the woman who stole a plastic flamingo from our hotel, the surf gods, egg rolls from Fat City, sand in my swim costume, all the convertibles on Ocean Beach that parked to watch the sun duck under." By 1957, at the wedding of their sister and brother, Willa and Patrick are locked into their dark dynamic. She watches him with another girl in a car, pushing "his finger inside her underwear," looking "like a dentist probing for a cavity." Then he dances with Willa, tracing her upper lip with his fragrant finger. The climactic encounter occurs in '61, on a sailing trip with their married siblings down the coast of Baja California. Willa is in her second year at the University of Victoria; Patrick has graduated from Cornell; bad things will happen. A final section set in 2001 reflects on the impact of these long-ago incidents on Willa's life.Elegant sentences in search of a plot wander through a series of dramatic incidents and reflections on the power of the male gaze.

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April 1, 2018

It's easy to understand why Willa's coming of age is troubled: her parents are separated, her mother's new beau Eugene is controlling and intense, and her mother is unhappy, self-destructive, and alcoholic. When Eugene's sons, lean and tanned, come to stay at Willa's family's summer home on Salt Spring Island, BC, nine-year-old Willa is intrigued. But something is off with Patrick: he burns moths with a magnifying glass and manipulates Willa into repeated acts of degradation. Willa is both repulsed and fascinated by him, and the novel chronicles their increasingly twisted relationship. Set in the 1950s, the narrative includes compelling period details and commentary about societal gender expectations. Unfortunately, while the author may have been shooting for something daring, sexy, and literary, she isn't successful. Her characters are universally unlikable; the timeframe jumps illogically; horrific events become gratuitous. VERDICT This first novel by an award-winning short story writer (Wallflowers) is a big ball of yuck trying too hard to be artful and provocative, piling one disturbing scene on top of another. Some readers may find it titillating, but others will say "enough."--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2018
Robertson's first novel opens in 1950, when nine-year-old narrator Willa is fascinated by the sons of her depressive alcoholic mother's new boyfriend, a not-very-likable man she calls Uncle Eugene. While golden-boy Kenneth has already glommed on to Willa's beautiful older sister, as most boys do, the intriguingly dark Patrick seems all for Willa. In episodic snippets over several years, Robertson, who received accolades for her short story collection, Wallflowers (2014), follows Willa's coming-of-age in various spots along the West Coast, leading up to an explosive moment shared by the two brothers and two sisters. With immediacy that's at the same time veiled in the haze of memory, Willa projects a sort of film of the most vivid, often also the most disturbing, moments of her past. Her narration is heavy with metaphors, realistically vague, and rife with sexual imagery and first experiences. There's only a loose sense of plot, and by the book's end, in the present day, readers won't be sure they even know Willa yet, making language, mood, and setting the primary draws here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)