- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Tindal Street Press (3 April 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 095358951X
- ISBN-13: 978-0953589517
- Product Dimensions: 2 x 1.7 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,244,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Birmingham Post
‘Gay’s narrative is tender, liberating, spiky and defiant… a gift for getting to the core of her characters… a joy to read’ (Big Issue)
‘Amusing and poignant… remarkable rendering of teenage angst’ (The Times)
‘A fine novel… the writer equally at home tackling the big stuff or rejoicing in the comparative minutiae of adolescent emotional wonder’
Danuta Reah
'Edgy and dark ... An uncomfortable, bleak but compelling read with a real sense of place and atmosphere.'
--This text refers to an alternate
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First Sentence
This is a city where rivers disappear. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
This is a city where rivers disappear. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Scapegrace is an excellent novel about growing up in the Midlands during the 1970s. It
describes the relationships between a 'coven' of schoolgirls who when they're not
experimenting with the dark arts in a garden shed are struggling to interpret high art in
their English literature class. The latter comes in the form of Arthur Miller's The
Crucible - an intertextual reference that is employed brilliantly by the author to
underscore the novel's themes of trial, denial and, above all, rebellion. The story is
extremely well handled. Gay's prose is lyrical, arresting and, often, very funny. She has
a gift for rendering the eccentricities of ordinary folk that is reminiscent of Anne Tyler.
It is novel of beauty and insight that you'll want to reread and I thoroughly recommend
it.
describes the relationships between a 'coven' of schoolgirls who when they're not
experimenting with the dark arts in a garden shed are struggling to interpret high art in
their English literature class. The latter comes in the form of Arthur Miller's The
Crucible - an intertextual reference that is employed brilliantly by the author to
underscore the novel's themes of trial, denial and, above all, rebellion. The story is
extremely well handled. Gay's prose is lyrical, arresting and, often, very funny. She has
a gift for rendering the eccentricities of ordinary folk that is reminiscent of Anne Tyler.
It is novel of beauty and insight that you'll want to reread and I thoroughly recommend
it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderfully written book, a page-turning story of real people in real situations -- a much needed antidote to Bridget Jones and her clones. It's a coming of age novel, which explores all that exaggerated teenage emphasis on honesty and justice and friendship and loyalty, before we're forced by life to make compromises; that heightened sense of being unfairly treated by parents and teachers and police and anyone else in authority. It's about working out how you are and learning how to live with it.
For Alice and her friends, the usual trials of adolescence are compounded by being branded outsiders and blamed for everything that goes wrong at school, parallelling the trials of the witches of Salem whose story they're studying in English. But the personal decisions they have to take as a result are thoroughly modern and their close-knit group splits up under the strain.
There's an adult perspective on this vivid account of teenage rebellion too. The grown-up alice escapes from her outwardly successful but empty life -- good job, decent but deadly dull husband, perfect home -- and comes back to pick up the pieces, find out what happened to her friends and all those high hopes of adolescence and have another go at getting it right.
I loved it. It's intelligent without being highbrow, romantic without a trace of sentimentality and politically committed without being in the slightest bit heavy -- in fact it's a very easy read. But satisfying, because it's relevant to what's going on now and the decisions women have to take, and because you really care about the characters and what happens to them.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Scapegrace' evokes a humorous, perceptive and vivid picture of Birmingham in the seventies, but is primarily a gripping story of the lives of five girls as they experience adolescence and begin to make choices about their futures. The story is narrated by Alice, returning twenty years later, reflecting on her past and trying to find her lost four friends.
I thought that 'Scapegrace' was extremely well-written: it tackled difficult issues - social discrimination, bullying, intimidation, single-parent families, drugs. This was done in such an interesting way that the narrative was not at all heavy or dismal: instead issues were weaved into and of secondary importance to an intriguing and gripping story-line. The characters of the five girls were explored in-depth and convincingly. The novel was also full of entertaining and thought-provoking 'walk-on' characters and sensitive snapshots of the families and teachers of the girls. Dialogue came across as convincingly and immediately as if part of a play-script, whilst descriptions of the hopes and troubles of the girls and their surroundings were moving but never overly-sentimental.
It was fantastic to read such striking and detailed descriptions of Birmingham in the seventies, although the book's readership deserves to extend far beyond either of these categories due to the strength of the characters, well-written narrative and vibrant desriptions.
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