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    The Clay Girl
    The Clay Girl
    The Clay Girl
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Clay Girl

    Written by Heather Tucker

    Narrated by Morgan Hallett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Vincent Appleton smiles at his daughters, raises a gun, and blows off his head. For the Appleton sisters, life had unravelled many times before. This time it explodes. Eight-year-old Hariet, known to all as Ari, is dispatched to Cape Breton and her Aunt Mary, who is purported to eat little girls . . . With Ari on the journey is her steadfast companion, Jasper, an imaginary seahorse. But when they arrive in Pleasant Cove, they instead find refuge with Mary and her partner Nia. As the tumultuous '60s ramp up in Toronto, Ari is torn from her aunts and forced back to her twisted mother and fractured sisters. Her new stepfather Len and his family offer hope, but as Ari grows to adore them, she's severed violently from them too, when her mother moves in with the brutal Dick Irwin. Through the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s, Ari struggles with her father's legacy and her mother's addictions - testing limits with substances that numb and men who show her kindness. She spins through a chaotic decade of loss and love, the devilish and divine, with wit, tenacity, and the astonishing balance unique to seahorses. The Clay Girl is a beautiful tour de force that traces the story of a child, sculpted by kindness, cruelty and the extraordinary power of imagination, and her families - the one she's born in to and the one she creates.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9781501939679
    The Clay Girl

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    Reviews for The Clay Girl

    4/5

    31 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      2.5 starsAri (Hariet) is only 8-years old when her abusive father shoots himself. Ari heads to Nova Scotia to live with her aunts. Her four older sisters… I’m not quite sure where they went. Even the summary so far is partly from the summaries online. Ari goes back and forth between her abusive mother in Ontario and her aunts. Luckily for Ari, her new stepfather (Len) is kind and caring. Even so, Ari has her imaginary friend, Jasper the seahorse, to help her along. Ok, so it was really hard to follow, especially at the start. I don’t like having to use an online summary to get me up to speed with what is happening as I read a book, but I didn’t like the way it was written, as there was too much reading between the lines to figure out what was going on much of the time (though not all the time). When I could figure out what was going on, it was good. But too hard to figure that out in too many places. Especially at the start, it didn’t help that all of Ari’s older sisters had names that started with J, in addition to Jasper. It also took a while to figure out who/what the heck Jasper was (and maybe I never would have without the online summary?). There were some things I liked – Ari’s relationship with Mikey, especially. Mikey was a stepbrother later on (not Len’s son, but the son of a different (abusive) stepfather later). I also liked Ari’s relationship with Len. I did think the story was good, but I did not like the way it was written, as it was just too hard to follow through much of the book.
    • 2/5
      THE CLAY GIRL seems overrated because this coming-of-age novel reads like a fairy tale (think Cinderella). The protagonist/narrator (Hariet (sic)/Ari) comes from an unbelievably dysfunctional home. We have drug addiction, brutal adults, corruption, greed, violence, molestation and suicide. She is even forced to prepare meals and clean up for the family much like Cinderella. Through it all, the plucky heroine manages to find solace in kindly teachers, sympathetic friends (both adult and adolescent), and especially an aunt who has been ostracized because of a longstanding and happy same sex relationship. Most seem too good to be true. Throughout, one knows that Ari will eventually find her prince. The only question being how much hell she will be forced to endure before that finally happens.The novel follows Hariet Appleton from age eight into young adulthood. She is a very bright and creative child who is farmed out to her loving Aunt Mary in Cape Breton following her father’s suicide and her mother’s inability to care for her and her five sisters due to a drug habit. Primarily to get her hands on her kindly second husband’s inheritance, Ari’s mother forces her to return to Totonto where she lives in a home with her brutal boyfriend, Dick Irwin. Although Tucker obviously intends Ari to be a heroic figure, she often comes across as someone who is just too precious to be easily liked or even believed. One of her most annoying affectations is Jasper, an imaginary seahorse companion that persists in unnecessarily interrupting the narrative flow with observations and advice that is meant to be humorous, but just seems to grate. Most of the characters are predictable and flat. They are either unbelievably benign or outrageously evil. Tucker’s good characters are culturally liberal, intelligent and kind, whereas the bad characters are self-centered, greedy, brutal and corrupt. She depicts Ari’s mother and Dick Irwin as cartoonish in their unrelenting badness. Tucker tends to write dialogue without any clear identifiers. In an interview, she remarks that she prefers using “sensual detail” over “he said.” This is all well and good but often can be too oblique to understand who is speaking. Moreover, her writing style tends to lapse into sentimentality, lacking in distance and objectivity.The novel is set in the 1960s in Toronto and Cape Breton. Tucker does better with evoking the bucolic maritime nature of the latter than she does with the former. Like most North American cities in the 60s, a drug and hippie culture was flourishing in Toronto. Yet Tucker fails to bring it alive for the reader. This is unfortunate since the bulk of the novel is set during that time.
    • 5/5
      If they had more stars I would add five more to give it a worlds first 10. The most unique, beautiful, poetry for the written word, astounding work I have read in a very long time. Highest recommendation.