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to Dream Weaver's BoutiqueEvan Zimroth. Collusion. USA, 1999. New York Times mini-review of Zimroth's Collusion. A more in-depth two-page Salon review is here.
A.N. Wilson. Dream Children. UK, 1998. A London Evening Standard review of A.N. Wilson's new novel, Dream Children (see below for details of the book and a thumbnail of the book's UK dust jacket). Update - UK paperback published by Abacus, May 1999!
... "Dream Children is brilliantly and mesmerically readable. Wilson has an unfakeable flair for storytelling - I read it virtually in one sitting, missing my stop on the Underground as I did so. I defy any reader, however they feel about the theme or the author's treatment of it, not to be utterly engaged by this book." ... "an exploration of how paedophilia might be consistent with moral agency and moral consciousness" -- The London Evening Standard.
Other reviews of Dream Children:
... "Dream Children, although a work of fiction, attempts to introduce a note of rationality into the debate. To that extent, it is both welcome and timely. [...] The scenario is enough to disturb any reader. It is a measure of Wilson's sureness of touch that he avoids prurience, avoids sensationalism, and makes us look at the situation with the same objectivity as he does. Oliver, palpably, is not a monster. Bobs, palpably, is not left traumatised by the relationship. [...] a brave and dispassionate treatment of a sensitive theme." -- The Daily Telegraph.
"...a novel which struck me as among the cleverest and funniest of the decade." -- Auberon Waugh in The Sunday Times.
"... a bitter and moral comedy, that makes Lolita look the self-indulgent melodrama it really is." -- The Scotsman.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. 'Del Amor y Otros Demonios' English translation of the title is 'On Love and Other Demons', was published in UK by Johnathon Cape in July 1995. There is also a 6-tape audio book. Nobel Prize -winning author. An advance review described it thus...
"The tale of the wonderous Serva Maria, a 12-year-old girl with the gift of tongues, who dies after being bitten by a rabid dog (and whose lustrous hair grows to 22 metres within her tomb), it turns rapidly into a Lolita-style love story. Before long the lovely but deranged Maria has ensnared the Inquisitorial cleric send by the evil bishop...she manages through Yoruba magic and childish tantrums, to get most of her own way. Her priestly lover comes to her at nights through an underground tunnel..."
Filipacchi, Amanda. Nude Men. Heinemann. London, 1993.
A weird and magical comedy novel about a licentious 11-year-old and her seduction of the vulnerable Jeremy Acidophilus. A roller-coaster plot, and often hilarious, but gets darker towards the end. A first-novel which had reviews in all the quality press in the UK.
Duras, Margurite. The North China Lover. Flamingo. London, Jan 1995.
Expanded and more erotic version of her novel 'The Lover', which was made into a major feature-film in about 1993. Schoolgirl has affair with Chinese man. Paperback.
Pears, Tim. In Place Of Fallen Leaves. Hamish Hamilton. London, 1993.
First-novel about a 13 year-old Devon farm girl and her relationship with a shy aristocrat. A superb novel. I think it won an award.
David Thompson. Woodbrook. Barrie and Jenkins, 1974. Penguin, 1976. (Currently out-of-print)
Follows the life of a young tutor in Eire, from age 18 to 28, as he falls in love with his (at first) 12 year old pupil, Phoebe.
David Cook. Happy Endings. First published in the UK by The Alison Press/Martin Secker and Warburg, 1974. Reprinted 1975. Published in the USA by Secker & Warburg, as "Happy endings : a novel", ISBN: 043610671X. Reprinted in paperback in the UK by Arena, 1989, ISBN 0909583003. (Currently out-of-print.) Winner of the 1977 E.M. Forster Award.
(Review-extract is in a back issue of Fresh Petals)
Theroux, Paul. Millroy The Magician. Hamish Hamilton. London, 1993.
Story of Millroy, who spots Jilly, a motherless 14-year-old (we're told that she looks "a skinny twelve"), at a country fair, and the relationship that ensues. World famous author.
Wharton, Edith. The Children (1928) Virago, 1985, reprinted London, 1994.
Novel about a man who falls in love with a schoolgirl. Filmed in 1980s, starring Ben Kingsley.
Rampling, Anne (pseudonym of Anne Rice) Belinda. MacMillan, London, 1986.
First published Arbor House, New York, 1986, then reprinted by various USA publishers. UK 'Books In Print' lists MacMillan paperback still in print in UK. Story of a love affair between a world-famous children's book illustrator and a 16 yo girl. He produces his very best work painting and drawing her, but can show it to no-one for fear it would ruin his career. By a world-famous and hugely popular writer. The girl is a little old, but the issues Rice deals with are applicable to relationships with younger girls.
In 1975, Analog (a U.S. science fiction magazine), published P.J. Plauger's novella "Child of All Ages". The central character is a little girl in present day America who had been born in pre-Common Era Greece near Athens, and who had maintained her long life by virtue of a formula compounded by her alchemist father. The problem with the longevity formula was that it only worked on prepubescent children, who were preserved as such thereby. Thus she was a "Child of All Ages."
From BoyChat: "One of the passages in the novella was interesting enough. A modern-day adult woman tried to lead the kid rather delicately to the proposition that as a child, the kid really hadn't experienced the full goodliness of life.
To this the kid replied something on the order of: "Like sex? What makes you think that I haven't had sex? I've got all the nerve endings in all the right places, and I've had plenty of lovers over the years, I assure you. Oh, most of them were a bit disappointed when I failed to ripen up on schedule, but sex is mostly a matter of physical and emotional closeness, and I'm well-equipped to enjoy that."
Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Bantam, 1995.
Science fiction. A Neo-Victorian engineer named John Percival Hackworth, who lives in the Neo-Victorian enclave in what used to be China, is comissioned by a nobleman named Lord Finkle-McGraw to create a book, to be entitled A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, to teach his granddaughter Elizabeth to think for herself and not be tied down by the strict Neo-Victorian society. The book is completely interactive, and is programmed to immediately "bond" with a little girl after it is constructed. (see the review in a previous issue of Fresh Petals).
Winsloe, Christa. The Child Manuela. Virago Press. London, 1994.
The novel on which the renowned 1931 German teacher-schoolgirl love film (mentioned in the footnotes on page 14 of the 'Paidika womens' issue) 'Maidens In Uniform' is based, re-published in the USA in 1975 and more recently reprinted as a UK English-language paperback by Virago.
Another interesting girl-woman read is:
Colette. Claudine at School. Penguin, 199?
Lolita:
(novel) (audio book) (annotated version)
Nabokov, V. Lolita.(1955) London. Everyman Classics, 1993.
The classic novel, a landmark of world fiction, and quite possibly the finest novel of the 20th century - also available as a full-text 12-hour audio-book, read by Jeremy Irons. Also available as an annotated version which explains and explicates all the obscure references.
Vladimir Nabokov's late novel 'Ada' - especially the erotic first third where Ada is twelve-years-old. If you haven't yet read it, it's published in paperback by Penguin in the UK, and you might want to skip the first couple of very boring genealogical pages - but after those, it's an intricate baroque masterpiece, scattered with allusions and references to 'Lolita' and 'Pale Fire'.
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