[ephemeral]

Last Things by Jenny Offill (April 1999, eBook: March 2015)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 2.15 Mb
Overview: Grace's father believes in science and builds his daughter a dollhouse with lights that really work. Grace's mother takes her skinny-dipping in the lake and teaches her about African hyena men who devour their wives in their sleep. Grace's world, of fact and fiction, marvels and madness, is slowly unraveling because her family is coming apart before her eyes.

Now eight-year-old Grace must choose between her two very different, very flawed parents, a choice that will take her on a dizzying journey, away from her home in Vermont to the boozy, flooded streets of New Orleans -- and into the equally wondrous and frightening realm of her own imagination.

With eloquence and compassion, Jenny Offill weaves a luminous story of a wounded family and of a young girl yearning to understand the difference between fiction, fact, and hope. A novel of vibrant imagination and searing intelligence, Last Things is a stunning literary achievement.
Genre: Fiction, Literary

"With an ornithologist mother who speaks five languages (including Pig Latin), who was also possibly a CIA spy, a cryptozoologist or just your average maniacal collector of eccentric facts, young Grace Davitt's coming-of-age story is a bizarre kind of linguistic ontological experiment. Her father is 'Mr. Science,' obsessed with physical data and categorical details to the point of abstraction. Grace's world is one that readers are unlikely ever to have encountered before; riding the line between whimsical and sinister, she is a unique protagonist. Oddly passive in the way that children considered unconventionally brilliant are sometimes deemed by observers, Grace takes control of her destiny, in the wake of her mother's unexplained disappearance, by reinventing language and metaphorizing her life. She continues with the rich and wacky legacy her mother has left her: home-schooling; a "secret language" named Annic in which the alphabet's first 13 letters mirror the second 13, and the "cosmic calendar" in which one billion years of real-time can be condensed into 24 days. Nothing in this narrative is standard fare: a bizarre mother-daughter road trip, a boy-genius babysitter, the Loch Ness monster and a recurrent theme of psychological anthropomorphism are among the plot elements. In spite of Grace's sometimes unlovable behavior, she is an engaging character. When she bullies a blind girl, Offil's point is clear; Grace's esoteric knowledge and novel socialization inform but cannot finally change the fact that she is a young girl on shaky ground. On the cusp of a definitively weird adolescence, she's brimming with the implosive, even brutal, energy of that impending transformation. Offill's debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family." ~Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The charisma and damage of madness gives a desperate, lyrical glamour to Jenny Offill's debut novel Last Things. Eight-year-old Grace Davitt's mother Anna is an ornithologist with a passion for knowledge. Not the sort that comes in dry and dusty lists in factual books but the intense matters of life and death with all their beauty and harshness. Anna's imagination is inspiring, defiantly off-kilter. She paints the spare room black and draws upon it the cosmic calendar -- the history of the world recreated with glow-in-the-dark stars. She has a birthday party for the earth -- 'it was 4.6 billion years old, so no candles, she said' -- and employs a boy genius who has a dream 'that one day entire cities might be illuminated by mould' to baby-sit. Everything goes awry on a road trip to New Orleans 'where there is always a parade' and where money and food and sleep are in short supply. There is the wistful hope that "someday we would drive our sweet-smelling car home, saying, 'We always thought of you. You never for a moment left our hearts.' They do arrive home but soon after Anna fills her coat pockets with stones and drives into the lake. Jenny Offill tells the story with a melancholy elegance; evolution, extinction, and madness sparkle like stars in this wise and wonderful tale of knowledge and loss. ~Eithne Farry

"Finally. Sixteen years after its original publication, and Last Things, this miraculous and wondrous novel, is now available as an eBook. So many things to say to encourage you to read this book: from Offill's unfailing imagination in the creation of her characters to the universe each character inhabits to her prose style that sings in its phenomenally lambent, limpid way. Or, simply, how about this naked declaration? Get this book. Read this book. Enjoy this book. Sit back in wonder after having read this book." ~ephemeral

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