This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn [Hardcover]

Grade 9 Up–Cordelia Kenn is 19 and happily expecting a baby girl. She writes a series of pillow books–Japanese diaries of total disclosure–to her unborn daughter. First, she describes her courtship with Will, her first love. The lengthy second book tells two stories, one on every other page. The remaining books describe her affair with a married man, an intimate friendship with a female teacher, and her reunion with her beloved. Cordelia writes of her life and desires with thrilling abandon and unabashed sexuality, and her first book–with its breathless pace, come-hither conversation, and chase and catch–is a whirling, delicious sex bomb. The form of the second book is jarring and infuriating if read in sequence, yet it's too disheartening, in a book of this size, to read one story and turn back 200 pages for the other. The real challenge for teens, though, is pages and pages of Cordelia's bad poetry and precious, banal, and often crushingly boring musings. Chambers's male characters are perfectly realized, and he hits bright, insecure Will right on the familiar, frustrating male teenage head. Unfortunately, Cordelia reeks of male fantasy, and Chambers's strings are evident as she and a friend write on each other and roll around naked; as she purports to love menstruation; as she expounds upon breasts ad nauseum. By the last third of the novel, even the formerly crisp dialogue often sounds like philosophical discourse. Cordelia's excruciating musings continue to intrude upon her last three books, and the electric promise of the first section is never fulfilled.–Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library
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With the publication of This Is All Chambers completes his ambitious, six-novel Dance sequence, which began with Breaktimein 1978 and also includes Dance on My Grave (1982), Now I Know (1988), The Toll Bridge (1995) and--most recently--the Carnegie and Printz Award Book Postcards from No Man's Land (2002). Each title is intended by the author to explore aspects of contemporary adolescent life, but none has been as ambitious, multilayered, or complex as the latest. Its premise, at least, is fairly straightforward. Nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn records the story of her life for the daughter with whom she is pregnant, planning to present it to the girl on her sixteenth birthday. The form Cordelia chooses for her tale is unusual: she is writing--or constructing--a pillow book (a la the tenth-century Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon), in which she not only records a narrative but also jots down poetry, ideas, observations, lists (she's a compulsive list-maker), musings, and more. Cordelia is such an acute observer and has such a lively, inquiring mind that, ultimately, her pillow book becomes six books. Each one has its own structure and narrative strategy. Book two, for example, is actually two stories--one fills the left-hand pages; the second, the right-hand pages. Readers must choose the order in which to read them. Some will complain about this; others will complain about the novel's great length. But the curious, the patient, and the adventurous will treasure the novel's challenges and savor its great rewards. Arguably, the book offers the most complete character study in all of young-adult literature, showing readers the life, mind, and soul of a teenage girl, while also giving readers full-dress portraits of her baby's father, her friends, her family, and--most satisfyingly--her English teacher and mentor, Julie. Cordelia records not only her love for these people but also for Shakespeare, for poetry, for words. Usparingly honest and candid, she never flinches from exploring the physical realities of her body or from recounting the sexually explicit details of her affair with an older man and her terrifying ordeal when she is kidnapped and threatened with rape. Cordelia records it all, because she wants to understand it all; she wants to know everything about herself, and her way of understanding is writing. Thus, she explores the why of things as well as the what and the how. In so doing, she's by turns captivating and maddening, for she loves to analyze and to discover ambiguities. And so her story challenges--but it will grow richer and larger with each reading. Ultimately, this novel is more than a mere piece de resistance; it is the masterpiece of one of young-adult literature's greatest living writers. Michael Cart
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