From Publishers Weekly
"When I was twenty-eight I decided to kill my mother." This sixth book from Rogers (Promised Lands; Mr. Wroe's Virgins) is a caustically memorable literary shocker, built tightly around its antiheroic narrator. Abandoned at birth and shuttled among foster homes around Birmingham, Nikki Black (a name she chose for herself because it had "teeth") decided in her teens to remain at a children's home rather than suffer the ministrations of hypocritical caregivers. To call her unsympathetic is putting it mildly: the grown-up Nikki hates everyone, using whomever she needs for sex, sleeping space or money, and connecting emotionally with no one. She has one purpose in life: to find her real mother (listed on her birth certificate as Phyllis Lovage), ask her why she abandoned her, and then kill her. A financial windfall lets Nikki track Phyllis down to the small, remote Scottish island of Ayssar, where she rents her spare room out to boarders. Herself dying from cancer, Phyllis makes money by selling herbal remedies; she uses the funds to care for her slightly retarded son, Calum. Nikki rents the room and conceals her identity, the better to spy on, and then slay, her motherAand to win the affections of Calum. This novel's macabre plot is compelling enough, but Rogers's real talent lies in tone and psychologyAin Nikki's sometimes horrifying, sometimes nearly reasonable flights of fancy, and in the asides, details, folktales and anecdotes that percolate through the main narrative. Fans of Ian McEwan should relish this stylish, charismatic addition to Britain's gallery of antiheroes. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Three archetypes collide in this darkly redemptive fairy tale by Rogers, author of
Mr. Wroe's Virgins (1999) and
Promised Lands (1997). Rogers weaves a spell with fractured myths through the angry narrative of Nikki Black. As a baby abandoned at a post office in the early hours of a cold morning, Nikki now seeks vengeance on the woman who left her. Searching for her mother and plotting her murder, she explains her life thus far in an extraordinary immediacy of voice. Nikki makes her way to an island off of Scotland. It is here, on a sea-tossed, mist-enshrouded rocky crag, that the fairy tale begins. But this is not children's hour--in these tales babies die and the witch is not so much wicked as enmeshed in her own unhappy epic. Nikki finds, with the aid of her newly found brother, the threads of her lost family. In doing so, she finds more than she is capable of understanding. Forced to take a stand, she turns once again to the powerful nature of myth to create her own, if not happy, than at least very satisfying end. It is left to the reader to decipher the meaning of the epiphany that unravels long after this deftly constructed tale is concluded.
Neal WyattCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
