NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

January 1, 1992
Already published in Great Britain, this often harrowing first novel by an American has been compared to Catcher in the Rye , most likely because narrator Maggie Pittsfield, 12 years old in the early '60s, shares Holden Caulfield's extraordinary discomfort with adult society--and his equally extraordinary ease in expressing it. But Maggie is angrier and in even greater pain than is Salinger's character, and her tale more particular. Although her affluent family tells her that she is the ``luckiest girl in North Bay,'' she's experienced so much trauma that she claims six different personalities (``It wasn't craziness-- The Six Faces of Maggie or anything like that--I didn't black out and then wake up dancing naked on a pool table. . . I was perfectly aware of all the parts and I knew when they were going to take over: there just wasn't anything I could do about it''), and most of them are unforgiving. Readers familiar with such pop presentations of child abuse as the TV film Sybil will easily spot the clues to Maggie's distressing secrets; the challenge in this book is not to anticipate the narrator's revelations but to appreciate the completeness of her voice. Stowe never soft pedals Maggie, and the reader's uneasiness with this sharp character paradoxically testifies to the integrity of her achievement.

January 1, 1992
The first-person narrative of this admirable literary debut comically reveals 12-year-old Maggie Pittsfield's secret, painful struggle with having been sexually abused. A reader having to deal otherwise with Maggie's victimization, her rage, her sometimes violent tendencies, and her six distinct personalities without Stowe's gift for invoking laughter might find the subject matter unbearable. Stowe's use of humor in no way detracts from the ragedy confronting Maggie, particularly since Maggie's family does its utmost to deny, minimalize, ignore, and even antagonize her troubled existence. Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye have skillfully portrayed girls in similar nightmarish situations. Stowe's novel has justifiably earned a place among these works.-- Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 1992
Maggie Pittsfield is a wry, precocious 12-year-old, coming of age in a mildly eccentric upper Michigan family in the mid-1960s. Derided by her demeaning grandmother when she replies "A man!" to the question of what she wants to be when she grows up, Maggie clarifies that she was not asked what she was "going" to be. What she really wants is not so much to be male ("I just don't want to be a woman") but to have male privilege and the freedom that accrues to it without the criticism that "ladies" don't do "that," or want "that," or act "that" way. Hers is a world of unanswered questions, veiled threats of perversion, and fears of getting "zapped" by a nuclear blast that, coupled with preadolescent angst, leaves her with a fragmented personality, borderline paranoia, and physical illness from psychic tensions. She keeps waiting for an "all clear" that never comes. Told with humor and intensity, this British import has already been compared with the work of Salinger and McCullers. ((Reviewed Jan. 1, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)