The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli

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2008, ginnetta correli, marshmallow press, the lost episodes of beatie scareli

Book: The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli

Publisher: Marshmallow Press

Furnished by: Library Thing’s Early Reviewers Program

On Sale Date: 2008

Publisher’s Description: “The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli is an experimental novel written as a touching hybrid of a bizarre television script. With prose and lyrics resulting in quick, readable, deftly crafted scenes. What starts off innocently told through the voice of a 12 year old girl (Beatie Scareli) is the story of how the young girl tries to make sense of her life through a nickelodeon view of the world.

At the same time a woman watches the young girl’s difficult past on her television. The story soon turns and twists until everything about the girl and her family becomes darkly connected to what becomes reality and fiction in the girl or woman’s mind.

The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli challenges the reader to look at human beings in a different way and to accept that given the right circumstances anyone even the reader can fall into a painful abyss of pop culture and get lost in their own reality.”

Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)

Review: The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli reads like the screenplay of a young girl’s life. It shows, realistically, how life for a child can go from picture-perfect to a chaotic whirlwind in the blink of an eye. The book begins with Beatie and her idiosyncratic family on a trip to the beach; her parents in love, the water warm — perfect. Yet in the time it takes to get back to the car from the beach, things already begin to fall apart for Beatie’s parents. From there, Beatie’s mother goes crazy, her father becomes violent, and Beatie is bounced around from home to home, never in an ideal or safe situation, yet attempting to find herself and grow up amidst the insanity of the adults in her life. As the novel continues, Beatie becomes more confused, as do the circumstances of her life, and accordingly, so does her dialogue. At the end, the reader is left feeling as though they’d like to reach through the page and pull Beatie into their own world, if only just to give her a hug for a minute.

I’m usually a fan of these tumultuous coming of age novels like Go Ask Alice, Girl Bomb, Pretty Little Dirty, etc. The Lost Episodes… falls into this category, but it falls a bit short of the aforementioned works. It reads like a first novel, and I get the impression that it is, so I give Correli kudos for that, at least. However, like most first novels, the plot isn’t fleshed out enough, it’s a bit scattered at times and you don’t get to know the characters quite as well as you’d like. I believe there’s a basis for a great novel here, but it just needs to be taken further.

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The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

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pagan kennedy, santa fey writers project, september 2008, the dangerous joy of dr. sex

Book: The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy

Publisher: The Santa Fey Writer’s Project

Furnished by: Library Thing’s Early Reviewers Program

On Sale Date: September 2008

Publisher’s Description: “Nonfiction is the new black comedy in this hilarious collection of award-winning literary essays written by the infamous Pagan Kennedy. In the title piece, Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, reinvents himself as a sex guru in California and hatches a plan to destroy monogamy forever. In the stories that follow, a retired chemist finds a way to turn a wasteland into paradise, an aspiring tyrant tries to become the emperor of America, and an artist rigs himself up to a “brain machine” made from parts he bought at Radio Shack. All of the essays—most of which have appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe Magazine—document the stories of visionaries bent on remaking the world, for better or for worse.”

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Review: Pagan Kennedy puts together a brilliant collection of her best articles for a wide and varied collection of national newspapers and magazines, creating a veritable encyclopedia of modern visionaries: writers, professors, scientists, engineers, ecologists and others who will awe and inspire her readers. And while that sounds like a good book in itself, it’s Kennedy’s poignantly witty and humanizing style of writing that really holds the readers’ attention, chapter after chapter, character after character.

As a fellow writer and a fan of magazine writing, I was hooked from the introduction — Kennedy has a comfortable, distinct voice which is quickly becoming a rarity in the 21st century. She also seems to love writing for the very same reason that I do — she loves her subjects. She loves their human idiosyncrasies; their ironic obsessions; the fish-out-of-water struggle that many of her visionaries live out each day, due to the fact that quite a few of them seem to be a bit before their times.

Pick this book up and read it on a rainy day when you’re feeling lethargic and struck by cabin fever. You’ll easily fly right through the book — it’s friendly and warm like your favorite magazine, but it recharges you like a fresh pair of batteries in a child’s favorite toy. What more could you want?