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A review by museoffire
The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) by Ainslie Hogarth
5.0
This book is appallingly good. Ainslie Hogarth has given birth to an entirely new genre here that I'm gonna call the torture porn coming of age novel. This book is marvelously disgusting, beautifully horrible and other words that really don't go together. Noelle is one of the most likable, believable heroines to hit the YA scene in a long time. Equal parts Scout, Katniss and Lizzie Borden if that's even possible. The reader feels for her, hates her choices, and dearly wants her to get out of this nightmare in one piece even though we know it ain't gonna happen.
Noelle has taken a summer job at the "Boy Meets Girl" Inn to escape her relationship with her appalling and increasingly ill father and her own increasingly bizarre blackouts where she drifts through what she calls "pattern space" where her only company are her own warped desires. Her only life line is a diary she keeps religiously in an effort to keep a reign on whatever is slowly overcoming her. As the night of a party to celebrate the horrific murders that once took place in the hotel approaches Noelle's grasp on reality becomes weaker and weaker.
Ms. Hogarth is a truly gifted writer. This book would not have packed half the punch it did without her expertly rendered descriptions, nightmarish "pattern space" sequences, and rich characters.
Whether truly haunted or merely at the end of her psychological rope what happens to Noelle in the course of this crazy awesome story is shattering. The course of her relationships with Alf, a sweet and adorkable co-worker, and the nightmarish home life she endures with her truly psychotic father Herman make for amazing reading.
Noelle's voice is utterly honest, so perfectly pitched to the tone of a disaffected, angry, passionate teenager caught in a sequence of events that would be too much for someone twice her age. Her relationship with the diary really does end up feeling like that between a parent and a horribly abused child, a tragic but definitely fitting metaphor for her own fractured relationship with her horrid parents.
Hogarth also breathes new and oddly hilarious life into one of the oldest literary tropes out there, the idea that we're reading Noelle's diary. She takes it in an entirely new direction by giving us the journal and also supplying the reader with the police notes and notes from the film crew making Noelle's story into a film. Its really nothing short of brilliant. They serve as the perfect comic relief when things have gotten just a little too bleak and bloody and also as a harsh glint of reality amidst Nicole's descent into madness. Other authors have attempted this time and time again but Ms. Hogarth is the only one I've seen get this kind of device dead right. Pun intended.
I seriously loved and was totally horrified by this book. It was funny and tragic and so, so, so bloody scary.
I don't think I will ever sleep comfortably in a hotel again.
Noelle has taken a summer job at the "Boy Meets Girl" Inn to escape her relationship with her appalling and increasingly ill father and her own increasingly bizarre blackouts where she drifts through what she calls "pattern space" where her only company are her own warped desires. Her only life line is a diary she keeps religiously in an effort to keep a reign on whatever is slowly overcoming her. As the night of a party to celebrate the horrific murders that once took place in the hotel approaches Noelle's grasp on reality becomes weaker and weaker.
Ms. Hogarth is a truly gifted writer. This book would not have packed half the punch it did without her expertly rendered descriptions, nightmarish "pattern space" sequences, and rich characters.
Whether truly haunted or merely at the end of her psychological rope what happens to Noelle in the course of this crazy awesome story is shattering. The course of her relationships with Alf, a sweet and adorkable co-worker, and the nightmarish home life she endures with her truly psychotic father Herman make for amazing reading.
Noelle's voice is utterly honest, so perfectly pitched to the tone of a disaffected, angry, passionate teenager caught in a sequence of events that would be too much for someone twice her age. Her relationship with the diary really does end up feeling like that between a parent and a horribly abused child, a tragic but definitely fitting metaphor for her own fractured relationship with her horrid parents.
Hogarth also breathes new and oddly hilarious life into one of the oldest literary tropes out there, the idea that we're reading Noelle's diary. She takes it in an entirely new direction by giving us the journal and also supplying the reader with the police notes and notes from the film crew making Noelle's story into a film. Its really nothing short of brilliant. They serve as the perfect comic relief when things have gotten just a little too bleak and bloody and also as a harsh glint of reality amidst Nicole's descent into madness. Other authors have attempted this time and time again but Ms. Hogarth is the only one I've seen get this kind of device dead right. Pun intended.
I seriously loved and was totally horrified by this book. It was funny and tragic and so, so, so bloody scary.
I don't think I will ever sleep comfortably in a hotel again.