Colony Girl

By Thomas Rayfiel

Book Overview

In Arhat, Iowa, there are cornfields and there's the Colony. Smart and precocious fifteen-year-old Eve is feeling stymied by both. So she gets her first job as a highway work crew flagman, falls in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374126445
• ISBN13: 9780374126445
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Wild Colonial Girl

I was put off this by reading that it was a book about a fifteen year old seductress by an author who is, to judge by the jacket photograph, a long way from being fifteen or seductive or female. (But then again would we think differently about it if he'd used a female pseudonym and a fake photo?) Another strike against it was that I'd found Rayfiel's last book "Split Levels" poorly constructed. A lot of pretentious stream of consciousness and dream sequences interrupted a moderately good mystery in an irritatingly anonymous suburb. This is a great improvement, although it still attempts too much and I must agree with other critics that the sex scenes are implausible and intrusive. Aside from her unlikely eroticism Eve is a great character. She is a fatherless girl whose mother has fled from California to Iowa. She takes up with a motherless boy whose father wants to flee from Iowa to California. She lives in a religious commune run by a "charismatic" leader reminiscent in a remarkable number of ways, which may be coincidental (I'm phrasing this tactfully) of the fraudulent guru in Updike's "S." Rayfiel cleverly exposes the ways religious cults can almost legitimize child molestation by early arranged marriages and political clout. One of the techniques is to persuade the girl that marriage is a short cut from childhood to adult status. I was reminded of Pearl Abraham's "The Romance Reader." Above all he is a gifted writer. By the end of the book we have a map of Arhat, Iowa, in our heads, and yet he never pauses for long-winded description. He has a seamless ability to make a few words do the work of setting the scene without adjectives and without holding up the action. For example, in one scene Eve feels ill because of working on the highway in the hot sun and gets into the shade of "a sign that listed Arhat's two motels. It was late afternoon. The metal threw a patch of shadow almost to the drainage ditch."

A moving page-turner

I loved this book. I have worked with adolescents in a variety of settings for 30 years and Mr. Rayfiel captures the struggle of leaving home with terrific insight. Though his young protagonist is from a nontraditional home he captures the universal conflict of separation from family in a way anyone can recognize. He demonstrates in a powerful way that the shape of "family" outside the norm maintains its significant impact and attachment issues. I have seen this over and over in my work with kids from different "family" constellations. Mr. Rayfiel's writing is poignant and heartfelt and the book is beautifully crafted. The story demonstrates the complex issues of growing up that include spirituality, sexual awakening, parental weakness, adult hypocrisy, peer relationships, sexism and narrowmindedness. Eve is definitely the Holden Caufield of the new millenium. This book will be a classic coming-of-age work.

The best book I have read in years!!!

This book is a must read! It is an exciting and intriguingcoming of age novel. A fifteen year old daughter of friends said"I can't believe a man wrote this, he understands what it's like to be a fifteen year old girl so well." Mr. Rayfiel not only creates a realistic character within a truly bizarre plot, he even makes us believe that it is completely natural to fall in love with both a father and his son. I loved this book and recommend it highly to everyone!

A surprising tour de force

I loved every page. One of the most surprising aspects of this book is how a man can write so insigthtfully and sensitively about the feelings of a young girl. It is truly a coming-of-age story with meaning for men and women of this era in America. The protagonist's reflections on her relationships both inside and outside of her "Colony" have lovely pearls of wisdom for all of us. All of my friends will find this under the Xmas tree this year.

extraordinary

The New York Times review (9/29/99, p.E8--"winning, original and supremely intelligent"; "the reader [will be] delighted and astonished") truly understates how creative, original and surprising this book is. Your children and grandchildren will be reading this book. The Times got it right when it compared it to Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye.