Repeat It Today with Tears
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A secretive child by nature, Susanna makes a covert list of everything she knows about her absent father, determined that one day she will find him. Unable and unwilling to adapt to life in her mother's unsympathetic household, she distances herself as much as possible.When she finally discovers her father's whereabouts and seeks him out, in the free and unconventional atmosphere of 1970s Chelsea, she conceals her identity, beginning an illicit affair that can only end in disaster.
Repeat it Today with Tears is in many ways a traditional love story, as well as a skilful evocation of radical times and desires. It is a fever dream that examines our need to be loved and accepted and a piercing portrait of madness. Anne Peile is a striking new voice in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peile's debut novel (long-listed for the U.K.'s Orange Prize) focuses on a love story between an unwitting man and his precocious seventeen-year-old daughter. Despite beautiful prose, the novel's underdeveloped characters prevent Peile from delivering on this daring premise. Susanna ("Susie") grows up in South London without her father, and becomes increasingly obsessed with the man in question John (Jack) ap Rhys Owen. When they meet by a chance encounter, Susie changes from a relatable, yearning girl to a manipulative, misguided young woman. She seduces the married Jack and lies to protect her identity from him, and his identity from her mean-spirited, neglectful mother. Told from Susie's immature and irresponsible perspective, what begins with a promising forbidden kiss ends in a lethal and misplaced sexual awakening. Readers will find it difficult to invest in these characters, particularly the idealized "father-lover" a selfless man who gives Susie a fair chance to walk away and the villainous mother, who (unlike Jack) remains nameless and is never described, seeming to exist only to deliver acidic insults about Jack.
