What do you think?
Rate this book
Mathilda
Mathilda Savitch ha tredici anni. Da quasi un anno sua sorella è morta finendo sotto un treno, spinta da uno sconosciuto. Mathilda reagisce alla perdita a modo suo, proponendosi di diventare perfida, di fare dispetti e cattiverie ogni volta che se ne presenta l'occasione, e nel frattempo pensa di premunirsi da un eventuale attacco terroristico, organizzando sistemi di fuga o di difesa (per esempio, un rifugio in cantina). Inoltre, elabora una sua classificazione delle persone, soprattutto anziane, dividendole in lucertole e uccelli. Ma la decisione più importante che prende è quella di leggere le mail ricevute dalla sorella e addirittura di rispondere, a nome di Helene, al fidanzato e alla madre, fino a decidere di incontrare il ragazzo della sorella, disperato perché non ha più avuto notizie dalla sua amata. Sarà così che Mathilda scoprirà la verità su quella morte ingombrante, che non è stata in effetti un incidente. Un giallo che è insieme romanzo di formazione e racconto delle scoperte del sesso e del mondo.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
68 people are currently reading
2174 people want to read
About the author
Victor Lodato
15 books308 followersVictor Lodato is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. EDGAR AND LUCY was called "a riveting and exuberant ride" by the New York Times, and MATHILDA SAVITCH, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as "a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel." MATHILDA SAVITCH, a "Best Book of the Year" according to The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and has been published in sixteen countries.
Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.
Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/given_name_...
Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.
Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/given_name_...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 506 reviews
April 2, 2010
i should wait to comment. i know this...but here's what i figured. you sit down to a meal at a new restaurant. you take the first bite. the food is sublime, the taste is remarkable. that very moment is memorable in its own right. that first impression, that feeling of being introduced to something spectacular. irrelevant if you wind up hating the meal because you stumbled upon a rancid turnip six bites later or you got acid reflux three hours after paying the check. that first bite remains intact...this is how i feel about mathilda savitch 40 pages in. the book was a last grab on the way to check out at barnes and noble yesterday. i cracked it open this afternoon and couldn't believe my good fortune! mathilda is an enormously engaging, charismatic and quirky young lady. i cannot wait to see where she takes me!
AT NOVEL'S END: witnessing author victor lodato, parading through chapters as a 13 year old girl (precocious as she may be), wound up being an altogether unpleasant experience. where the beginning of the book is brightly lit with colorful neuroses and holden caulfield-esque descriptions of classmates and aging pets, it changes tone and you literally feel lodato struggle to maintain the voice of a young girl. after we learn that mathilda's 16 year old sister has died a year ago under the wheels of a train and her parents ("ma" and "da") are nowhere near coping, the protagonist becomes rather perverse and world weary. set on delving deep into her sister's private past and learning all there is to learn about her death and life immediately preceeding it, mathilda isn't a confused or traumatized teen. she's a mean spirited, sexually obsessed, jaded, bitter and caustic 30-something male, who can't help himself when he throws in terrorists, war vets missing limbs and an adolescent sex moment in a damp basement. where wally lamb WAS dolores in "she's come undone," lodato creates a near perfect character in mathilda savitch and then shoves her off the stage and steals her lines once the story gets cooking.
AT NOVEL'S END: witnessing author victor lodato, parading through chapters as a 13 year old girl (precocious as she may be), wound up being an altogether unpleasant experience. where the beginning of the book is brightly lit with colorful neuroses and holden caulfield-esque descriptions of classmates and aging pets, it changes tone and you literally feel lodato struggle to maintain the voice of a young girl. after we learn that mathilda's 16 year old sister has died a year ago under the wheels of a train and her parents ("ma" and "da") are nowhere near coping, the protagonist becomes rather perverse and world weary. set on delving deep into her sister's private past and learning all there is to learn about her death and life immediately preceeding it, mathilda isn't a confused or traumatized teen. she's a mean spirited, sexually obsessed, jaded, bitter and caustic 30-something male, who can't help himself when he throws in terrorists, war vets missing limbs and an adolescent sex moment in a damp basement. where wally lamb WAS dolores in "she's come undone," lodato creates a near perfect character in mathilda savitch and then shoves her off the stage and steals her lines once the story gets cooking.
November 14, 2016
I did not like this novel. It’s me, Novel, not you. Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato is a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” award winner, whatever that means. I bought it over five years ago (I write the purchase dates of my books inside the covers so I can be embarrassed by how long it takes me to read them) when I was browsing. It was an impulse buy. While I found it to be interesting/vexing and well-written (but in a style that I didn’t like), I eventually felt disappointed and irritated by the book’s ending/non-ending.
Mathilda is a very new teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old (her specific age is never given which irritates the snot out of me because that knowledge would have helped me better understand her). Her older sister (sixteen years old) died a year ago when a man pushed her in front of an oncoming train. The crime has not been solved. Mathilda’s parents have never recovered from this tragedy and basically ignore Mathilda and drift through their days. Her mother has turned into some kind of alcoholic zombie and has taken a leave of absence from work. Nobody even pays attention to the loyal, aged family dog Luke. I was preoccupied with the dog while reading this book because it seemed to me that the dog wasn’t well and needed to go to the vet, but no one took him. (The dog is okay by end of book. He probably took himself to the vet.) Because Mathilda is feeling invisible, she decides she’s going to be bad in order to get her parents’ attention. She’s also going to solve the crime of her sister’s murder by going through her diary, her emails, anything she can find because she suspects the man who killed her was one of her boyfriends. Helene was very pretty and had a lot of boyfriends. It sounds like a sort of mystery, something akin to the Flavia De Luce novels, in which a teenage girl solves a local mystery/crime. That’s not really what it is at all. Basically it’s the story of a bunch of fucked-up people not dealing with their daughter’s (sister’s) death. The family grief plays against the larger tragedy of a nation still reeling from 9/11 and the ongoing uneasiness of continued terrorism threats.
“I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but not too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse” (3). Lodato’s prose is original and I liked it at first. However, when you’re constantly in the head of a very mixed up twelve-fourteen year old, it becomes relentless. What kept me reading was I wanted to know how these very messed up characters would change throughout the book. I didn’t like any of them; the parents, particularly the mother, are very distant and say little. Although I had sympathy at the beginning, the more I read about them, the more I detested them. Yes, your eldest daughter is dead, but you still have a child. Pull yourselves together, get some damn therapy (they send Mathilda to therapy but never go as a family) and deal with it. They wallow in their grief, being self-indulgent at the expense of the health of the family as a whole. Mathilda herself comes across as a troubled, unhappy girl tired of being ignored by her family and treated weirdly by friends and schoolmates because of her sister’s death. But the more I read, the more fucked-up I think she is. She seems to yell everything and people are always saying to her, “Mathilda, stop yelling.” I am sympathetic to her situation, but she comes across as irritating, unlikable and somewhat fucking creepy. In fact, she made up a game called “Creeps” in which she and her friend Anna (who is mentally slow) used to play. “The rules are simple. One of us pretends to be a boy and the other one is the girl. The boy says stuff to try to seduce the girl but she won’t have anything to do with him. Sometimes the boy has to be very persistent. Sometimes he almost has to threaten the girl. I’m much better at it than Anna. Playing the boy, I mean” (220). This is pretty weird. Particularly when Mathilda describes the things she said when playing the boy and trying to “seduce” Anna; comments such as: “hey, you’ve got a hot body;” “you’ve got a nice ass;” “what the fuck, you think you’re too good for me?” Mathilda also physically threatens Anna when playing this Creeps game. I think there’s something wrong with Mathilda. Granted, she and Anna became friends after Helene’s death and Mathilda’s family situation is unhappy, but that’s weird no matter what. Also, it says something about Mathilda (nothing good) that she picked Anna as her friend because Anna is very pretty, but slow. Mathilda herself is exceptionally intelligent and clever for her age.
I can’t say there’s really a plot. I just kept reading to see what would happen. Although after I discovered that , I was rather annoyed. More evidence that Mathilda is off her rocker, and her parents are absolute shitheads for not getting everyone’s asses into family therapy, maybe even Luke the dog (he is clearly upset). Mathilda does a lot of stupid things, but she’s a kid, so I get that. However, towards the end of the novel When Mathilda returns after her day trip to find Helene’s boyfriend, she doesn’t go home to let anyone know she’s okay even though she left without telling anyone where she was going and also called her mother from the train station, knowing full well that the sound of the trains coming into the station would send her mother into hysterics. Mathilda knocks on the window of Kevin, a teenage boy who lives next door. Mathilda has a crush on him even though he likes Anna (and did something really not cool to Anna while Mathilda spied on them and never stopped him, even though she didn’t think Anna was willing). Kevin, after being prompted by Mathilda, lets her into the house and into his bedroom. Everyone else is asleep because it’s after midnight. I found this whole scene with Kevin so damn predictable.
I did not like this book. I understand the author was trying to explore the themes of grief and tragedy (individual, family and national) and how, as individuals, we deal with these events. However, he lost me with completely unlikable and (unfortunately) unsympathetic characters. If Mathilda’s parents had been more fleshed out and real to me, I may have been more interested in them, but they were basically ghosts who drifted in and out of the book. The prose is well-written and Mathilda is a complex and fascinating character…until she starts to get on your nerves and you want to slap her. The conclusion of this novel isn’t a conclusion. It’s not even one of those artsy, vague endings that supposedly has meaning. I don’t see any real change in the characters or even a hint of some kind of change. The ending irritated me so much I threw the book across the room. I don’t need everything tied up neatly in a bow, but after forcing myself to finish this weird book I expected something.
Mathilda Savitch is one of those odd books I can’t recommend either for or against. You have to read it for yourself to decide.
Mathilda is a very new teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old (her specific age is never given which irritates the snot out of me because that knowledge would have helped me better understand her). Her older sister (sixteen years old) died a year ago when a man pushed her in front of an oncoming train. The crime has not been solved. Mathilda’s parents have never recovered from this tragedy and basically ignore Mathilda and drift through their days. Her mother has turned into some kind of alcoholic zombie and has taken a leave of absence from work. Nobody even pays attention to the loyal, aged family dog Luke. I was preoccupied with the dog while reading this book because it seemed to me that the dog wasn’t well and needed to go to the vet, but no one took him. (The dog is okay by end of book. He probably took himself to the vet.) Because Mathilda is feeling invisible, she decides she’s going to be bad in order to get her parents’ attention. She’s also going to solve the crime of her sister’s murder by going through her diary, her emails, anything she can find because she suspects the man who killed her was one of her boyfriends. Helene was very pretty and had a lot of boyfriends. It sounds like a sort of mystery, something akin to the Flavia De Luce novels, in which a teenage girl solves a local mystery/crime. That’s not really what it is at all. Basically it’s the story of a bunch of fucked-up people not dealing with their daughter’s (sister’s) death. The family grief plays against the larger tragedy of a nation still reeling from 9/11 and the ongoing uneasiness of continued terrorism threats.
“I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but not too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse” (3). Lodato’s prose is original and I liked it at first. However, when you’re constantly in the head of a very mixed up twelve-fourteen year old, it becomes relentless. What kept me reading was I wanted to know how these very messed up characters would change throughout the book. I didn’t like any of them; the parents, particularly the mother, are very distant and say little. Although I had sympathy at the beginning, the more I read about them, the more I detested them. Yes, your eldest daughter is dead, but you still have a child. Pull yourselves together, get some damn therapy (they send Mathilda to therapy but never go as a family) and deal with it. They wallow in their grief, being self-indulgent at the expense of the health of the family as a whole. Mathilda herself comes across as a troubled, unhappy girl tired of being ignored by her family and treated weirdly by friends and schoolmates because of her sister’s death. But the more I read, the more fucked-up I think she is. She seems to yell everything and people are always saying to her, “Mathilda, stop yelling.” I am sympathetic to her situation, but she comes across as irritating, unlikable and somewhat fucking creepy. In fact, she made up a game called “Creeps” in which she and her friend Anna (who is mentally slow) used to play. “The rules are simple. One of us pretends to be a boy and the other one is the girl. The boy says stuff to try to seduce the girl but she won’t have anything to do with him. Sometimes the boy has to be very persistent. Sometimes he almost has to threaten the girl. I’m much better at it than Anna. Playing the boy, I mean” (220). This is pretty weird. Particularly when Mathilda describes the things she said when playing the boy and trying to “seduce” Anna; comments such as: “hey, you’ve got a hot body;” “you’ve got a nice ass;” “what the fuck, you think you’re too good for me?” Mathilda also physically threatens Anna when playing this Creeps game. I think there’s something wrong with Mathilda. Granted, she and Anna became friends after Helene’s death and Mathilda’s family situation is unhappy, but that’s weird no matter what. Also, it says something about Mathilda (nothing good) that she picked Anna as her friend because Anna is very pretty, but slow. Mathilda herself is exceptionally intelligent and clever for her age.
I can’t say there’s really a plot. I just kept reading to see what would happen. Although after I discovered that , I was rather annoyed. More evidence that Mathilda is off her rocker, and her parents are absolute shitheads for not getting everyone’s asses into family therapy, maybe even Luke the dog (he is clearly upset). Mathilda does a lot of stupid things, but she’s a kid, so I get that. However, towards the end of the novel When Mathilda returns after her day trip to find Helene’s boyfriend, she doesn’t go home to let anyone know she’s okay even though she left without telling anyone where she was going and also called her mother from the train station, knowing full well that the sound of the trains coming into the station would send her mother into hysterics. Mathilda knocks on the window of Kevin, a teenage boy who lives next door. Mathilda has a crush on him even though he likes Anna (and did something really not cool to Anna while Mathilda spied on them and never stopped him, even though she didn’t think Anna was willing). Kevin, after being prompted by Mathilda, lets her into the house and into his bedroom. Everyone else is asleep because it’s after midnight. I found this whole scene with Kevin so damn predictable.
I did not like this book. I understand the author was trying to explore the themes of grief and tragedy (individual, family and national) and how, as individuals, we deal with these events. However, he lost me with completely unlikable and (unfortunately) unsympathetic characters. If Mathilda’s parents had been more fleshed out and real to me, I may have been more interested in them, but they were basically ghosts who drifted in and out of the book. The prose is well-written and Mathilda is a complex and fascinating character…until she starts to get on your nerves and you want to slap her. The conclusion of this novel isn’t a conclusion. It’s not even one of those artsy, vague endings that supposedly has meaning. I don’t see any real change in the characters or even a hint of some kind of change. The ending irritated me so much I threw the book across the room. I don’t need everything tied up neatly in a bow, but after forcing myself to finish this weird book I expected something.
Mathilda Savitch is one of those odd books I can’t recommend either for or against. You have to read it for yourself to decide.
June 23, 2014
That feeling you get, after you read a book, and you think to yourself...what?
Much like the other reviews, Mr. Lodato convinced me I was reading about a 13-year old girl's coming-of-age story, but I am not convinced that this was the most accurate representation. Mathilda is mean, twisted and cannot be trusted as a narrator. The latter would have made me pick up the book and give it a go, but the plot line is horrible. Simple horrid.
All the while I am reading, I am waiting for this grand adventure to find the killer. To discover more about her sister. To have some sort of climax. Nothing. Instead, I am not sure what I found. A few chapters dedicated to a post 9/11 era that made no useful connection to the story line.
I want to write a million things about how disappointing this novel is. I still cannot wrap my head around it. I want the few hours back this story took from my weekend. The characters did not get better and nor did the plot.
The least I can say is I have a nice tan thanks to this horrid book.
Much like the other reviews, Mr. Lodato convinced me I was reading about a 13-year old girl's coming-of-age story, but I am not convinced that this was the most accurate representation. Mathilda is mean, twisted and cannot be trusted as a narrator. The latter would have made me pick up the book and give it a go, but the plot line is horrible. Simple horrid.
All the while I am reading, I am waiting for this grand adventure to find the killer. To discover more about her sister. To have some sort of climax. Nothing. Instead, I am not sure what I found. A few chapters dedicated to a post 9/11 era that made no useful connection to the story line.
I want to write a million things about how disappointing this novel is. I still cannot wrap my head around it. I want the few hours back this story took from my weekend. The characters did not get better and nor did the plot.
The least I can say is I have a nice tan thanks to this horrid book.
February 26, 2020
Un mundo para Mathilda
: 3 estrellas.
Mathilda ya no es una niña, o al menos cree que quiere dejar de serlo. ¿Cómo saberlo realmente? Su curiosidad infantil la lleva a situaciones en las que nadie hubiese querido encontrarse, y su rebeldía adolescente la empuja a seguir aún más allá de los límites. Aunque si ser adulta significa parecerse a sus padres, entonces no quiere saber nada al respecto. A veces da la impresión de que nadie la entiende, que nadie la quiere, que nadie la escucha. Están muy ocupados, no quieren hablar de eso, todos callan y le dicen que ella debe hacer lo mismo. Pero Mathilda no puede guardar silencio; Mathilda lo va a gritar, lo va a enseñar y lo va a descubrir.
Este libro me hizo enojar mucho. No tanto porque sea malo, sino por lo que creo que pudo haber sido.
La historia está narrada por Mathilda, en primera persona, en presente y dirigida a nosotros. Eso ya nos otorga una perspectiva bastante parcial de las cosas. La voz inocente e igualmente provocativa del personaje está bien recreada, y hacen que la lectura sea ágil. Claro que nos vamos enterando de las cosas a medida que ella desea contárnoslo, según lo que vean sus ojos o lo que piense.
Al principio la trama es un día a día con sus ideas, sus travesuras y la relación con sus padres, amigos, etc. Hasta ese punto en realidad creí que esto tenía potencial, en especial porque se empezaba a vislumbrar cierto conflicto con la madre y una actitud en ella que parecía más una reacción que una acción. A las pocas páginas ya nos enteramos de la trágica muerte de su hermana mayor, Helene. Por momentos, Mathilda la idealiza, lo que es compresible, y luego le da un golpe de realidad que la baja del pedestal de un tirón. Siempre queda la sensación de que todavía falta algo por contar y estamos todos a la espera de que se decida a hacerlo.
Algo que no entendí fueron todas las referencias a los atentados que se hacen a lo largo de la novela. Puedo ver que es una forma de generar empatía, pertenencia, y cómo el autor trató de relacionarlo a la vulnerabilidad que ya circulaba en el ambiente de ese hogar. No obstante, da la sensación que es un tema que queda colgando en la trama sin un sentido definido, como un detalle para rellenar.
En mi opinión, la primera mitad del libro es bastante interesante. Además de lo anterior, observamos que existe un trasfondo psicológico en la relación madre e hija por la muerte de Helene, que la primera aún no puede superar y que la segunda no termina de aceptar; ni hablemos de hacer el duelo. Y el padre casi que está pintado en ese cuadro, ya que queda en el medio de las dos.
A su vez, como toda adolescente, ella sigue haciendo cosas para llamar la atención y para lidiar con esos cambios hormonales propios de la edad.
El final es casi anecdótico.
Y una vez que no hay ninguna otra página que leer, te das cuenta de que todo quedó a medias. He leído que varias críticas comparan a Mathilda con Holden Caulfield, a este libro con The catcher in the rye de Salinger; bueno, nada más errado y ambicioso. Sí, los dos personajes están en esa edad tan complicada que es la adolescencia y se abren camino por sí mismos para afrontarla. Sin embargo, la principal diferencia es que Holden va en busca de la juventud, de convertirse en un adulto. En cambio, Mathilda está siendo arrojada en esa dirección en contra de su voluntad, todavía se aferra a esa niñez que perdió cuando su hermana murió.
Un mundo para Mathilda es una novela ambiciosa, que promete más de lo que cumple. Es como un paseo en el que ves muchas cosas interesantes a los costados, aunque en vez de detenerte allí, seguís avanzando por otros caminos. Al final del recorrido llegas al punto de inicio otra vez, conociendo todo lo nuevo que viste en el trayecto, pero teniendo que empezar a caminar por el mismo sendero nuevamente. En esta historia los problemas no se resuelven, sólo se descubren nuevos detalles. La primera parte te envuelve en una tristeza intrigante y te arrastra, mientras que la segunda te lleva a lugares equivocados y te retiene ahí más de lo necesario.
En resumen, una lectura interesante, que pudo ser mucho más.
Mathilda ya no es una niña, o al menos cree que quiere dejar de serlo. ¿Cómo saberlo realmente? Su curiosidad infantil la lleva a situaciones en las que nadie hubiese querido encontrarse, y su rebeldía adolescente la empuja a seguir aún más allá de los límites. Aunque si ser adulta significa parecerse a sus padres, entonces no quiere saber nada al respecto. A veces da la impresión de que nadie la entiende, que nadie la quiere, que nadie la escucha. Están muy ocupados, no quieren hablar de eso, todos callan y le dicen que ella debe hacer lo mismo. Pero Mathilda no puede guardar silencio; Mathilda lo va a gritar, lo va a enseñar y lo va a descubrir.
Este libro me hizo enojar mucho. No tanto porque sea malo, sino por lo que creo que pudo haber sido.
La historia está narrada por Mathilda, en primera persona, en presente y dirigida a nosotros. Eso ya nos otorga una perspectiva bastante parcial de las cosas. La voz inocente e igualmente provocativa del personaje está bien recreada, y hacen que la lectura sea ágil. Claro que nos vamos enterando de las cosas a medida que ella desea contárnoslo, según lo que vean sus ojos o lo que piense.
Al principio la trama es un día a día con sus ideas, sus travesuras y la relación con sus padres, amigos, etc. Hasta ese punto en realidad creí que esto tenía potencial, en especial porque se empezaba a vislumbrar cierto conflicto con la madre y una actitud en ella que parecía más una reacción que una acción. A las pocas páginas ya nos enteramos de la trágica muerte de su hermana mayor, Helene. Por momentos, Mathilda la idealiza, lo que es compresible, y luego le da un golpe de realidad que la baja del pedestal de un tirón. Siempre queda la sensación de que todavía falta algo por contar y estamos todos a la espera de que se decida a hacerlo.
Algo que no entendí fueron todas las referencias a los atentados que se hacen a lo largo de la novela. Puedo ver que es una forma de generar empatía, pertenencia, y cómo el autor trató de relacionarlo a la vulnerabilidad que ya circulaba en el ambiente de ese hogar. No obstante, da la sensación que es un tema que queda colgando en la trama sin un sentido definido, como un detalle para rellenar.
En mi opinión, la primera mitad del libro es bastante interesante. Además de lo anterior, observamos que existe un trasfondo psicológico en la relación madre e hija por la muerte de Helene, que la primera aún no puede superar y que la segunda no termina de aceptar; ni hablemos de hacer el duelo. Y el padre casi que está pintado en ese cuadro, ya que queda en el medio de las dos.
A su vez, como toda adolescente, ella sigue haciendo cosas para llamar la atención y para lidiar con esos cambios hormonales propios de la edad.
El final es casi anecdótico.
Y una vez que no hay ninguna otra página que leer, te das cuenta de que todo quedó a medias. He leído que varias críticas comparan a Mathilda con Holden Caulfield, a este libro con The catcher in the rye de Salinger; bueno, nada más errado y ambicioso. Sí, los dos personajes están en esa edad tan complicada que es la adolescencia y se abren camino por sí mismos para afrontarla. Sin embargo, la principal diferencia es que Holden va en busca de la juventud, de convertirse en un adulto. En cambio, Mathilda está siendo arrojada en esa dirección en contra de su voluntad, todavía se aferra a esa niñez que perdió cuando su hermana murió.
Un mundo para Mathilda es una novela ambiciosa, que promete más de lo que cumple. Es como un paseo en el que ves muchas cosas interesantes a los costados, aunque en vez de detenerte allí, seguís avanzando por otros caminos. Al final del recorrido llegas al punto de inicio otra vez, conociendo todo lo nuevo que viste en el trayecto, pero teniendo que empezar a caminar por el mismo sendero nuevamente. En esta historia los problemas no se resuelven, sólo se descubren nuevos detalles. La primera parte te envuelve en una tristeza intrigante y te arrastra, mientras que la segunda te lleva a lugares equivocados y te retiene ahí más de lo necesario.
En resumen, una lectura interesante, que pudo ser mucho más.
March 10, 2013
I bought this book based on the first sentence, where Mathilda tells the audience that she has decided to be awful. The prose was poetic and wonderful at first, and I expected to luxuriate in the language of this book and savor it, but it was all downhill after the first couple of chapters. Not only does the prose become less poetic, but the story kind of sucks. I mean, I can believe that a teenage girl would think along the lines that Mathilda does, or that she would construct the inner world that she does, but the story just seems to deteriorate more and more until it just crumbles at the end. I don't want to spoil the story by giving details. It didn't work for me.
The other thing that bothered me was`the glaring mistakes the author made when he constructed the dialogue and sexual perception of the teenage girl characters in the novel. The mistakes I found might seem subtle, but to me they really stuck out. Like, when one of the girls has her first period, she tells Mathilda that she's "bleeding." I've never actually heard a young girl refer to her periods in this way, although I can imagine that some girls do. I was taught to call it my period, and I've only ever heard men say "bleeding," so when the girl tells her friend she's bleeding I thought she must have injured herself somehow. But Mathilda knows exactly what she's talking about, which I wouldn't have at that age. I also think the author could have benefited from asking an actual woman what certain sexual experiences feel like from the female perspective. These are things that might not bother another person, but to me they made it difficult to suspend my disbelief because the scenes felt like something a man made up to imagine what a girl might feel, rather than the reality. Despite the horrible story, I think the author still would have been better off leaving out the girls' observations about their developing bodies and their first sexual explorations, because it just didn't ring true. If I'd had the chance to talk to this author before he turned in the script, I would have advised him to write the book from the POV of a teenage boy and just scrap the idea of trying to get into the mind of a teenage girl.
The other thing that bothered me was`the glaring mistakes the author made when he constructed the dialogue and sexual perception of the teenage girl characters in the novel. The mistakes I found might seem subtle, but to me they really stuck out. Like, when one of the girls has her first period, she tells Mathilda that she's "bleeding." I've never actually heard a young girl refer to her periods in this way, although I can imagine that some girls do. I was taught to call it my period, and I've only ever heard men say "bleeding," so when the girl tells her friend she's bleeding I thought she must have injured herself somehow. But Mathilda knows exactly what she's talking about, which I wouldn't have at that age. I also think the author could have benefited from asking an actual woman what certain sexual experiences feel like from the female perspective. These are things that might not bother another person, but to me they made it difficult to suspend my disbelief because the scenes felt like something a man made up to imagine what a girl might feel, rather than the reality. Despite the horrible story, I think the author still would have been better off leaving out the girls' observations about their developing bodies and their first sexual explorations, because it just didn't ring true. If I'd had the chance to talk to this author before he turned in the script, I would have advised him to write the book from the POV of a teenage boy and just scrap the idea of trying to get into the mind of a teenage girl.
March 11, 2010
Mathilda Savitch was a pretty unusual read. I thought it was going to be completely different from what it turned out to be. The summary in the back of the book states that Mathilda is trying to find the truth of her sister's death. It's less about her finding the truth than it is about her trying to cope with the grief brought on by her sister's death.
I've read a couple of reviews that mention that the voice of the Mathilda rang false for them. To me, Mathilda was like any other teen girl who was trying to find her way. She's trying to deal with the death of her sister and with her parents zombie behavior that was brought on by the death the only way she knows how: causing mischief. Due to the fact that Mathilda was the narrator, I was able to get into this story more than I would have had it been written in the third person. If you add the fact that Mathilda is often an unreliable person in which to get your information, then I believe you have a winner.
Even though Mathilda Savitch deals with a depressing topic (the death of a family member) and the story is set to a backdrop where acts of terror are part of the norm more than they really are in this current time period, I found that the book did have some humorous parts. Mathilda is just so witty and sarcastic that it's almost impossible not to end up caring for her. She's extremely imaginative and due to this, it's heartbreaking to see her try so hard to get a little bit of attention from her grieving parents.
Mathilda Savitch was an enthralling read. Some parts were a bit jumbled and tended to ramble (hence the four star rating and not five stars), but overall it was an enjoyable read. Highly recommended!
P.S. This was a First Reads Program win.
I've read a couple of reviews that mention that the voice of the Mathilda rang false for them. To me, Mathilda was like any other teen girl who was trying to find her way. She's trying to deal with the death of her sister and with her parents zombie behavior that was brought on by the death the only way she knows how: causing mischief. Due to the fact that Mathilda was the narrator, I was able to get into this story more than I would have had it been written in the third person. If you add the fact that Mathilda is often an unreliable person in which to get your information, then I believe you have a winner.
Even though Mathilda Savitch deals with a depressing topic (the death of a family member) and the story is set to a backdrop where acts of terror are part of the norm more than they really are in this current time period, I found that the book did have some humorous parts. Mathilda is just so witty and sarcastic that it's almost impossible not to end up caring for her. She's extremely imaginative and due to this, it's heartbreaking to see her try so hard to get a little bit of attention from her grieving parents.
Mathilda Savitch was an enthralling read. Some parts were a bit jumbled and tended to ramble (hence the four star rating and not five stars), but overall it was an enjoyable read. Highly recommended!
P.S. This was a First Reads Program win.
January 24, 2010
The back cover blurb uses the Catcher comparison, and I'm usually drawn in by that.
The first chapters held promise. I didn't like the character but I hoped that as I read on, I would come to love her in the same way that I love Holden. Both are confused kids who don't communicate effectively with their parents; both have suffered the loss of a sibling; both do really stupid things in an effort to deal with the loss.
However, Mathilda doesn't change. While the inner workings of her mind are fascinating and - as a mythology teacher - I appreciated the allusions to myth - there wasn't enough depth here, and the big-picture (post-September 11) ideas never really came together, which I think they should if a novel is to be truly surprising and effective. Very often the author took the easy way out (especially with relation to Mathilda's discovery of her sister's secrets).
For a book that depicts a kid dealing with loss and family secrets in a post-September 11 world, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the kind of book that brings it all together at the end and just blows you away. For a contemporary book about sibling loss, Francine Prose's Goldengrove does it better. Still, I am not sorry that I devoted time to Mathilda's journey. Fast read, but ultimately disappointing.
The first chapters held promise. I didn't like the character but I hoped that as I read on, I would come to love her in the same way that I love Holden. Both are confused kids who don't communicate effectively with their parents; both have suffered the loss of a sibling; both do really stupid things in an effort to deal with the loss.
However, Mathilda doesn't change. While the inner workings of her mind are fascinating and - as a mythology teacher - I appreciated the allusions to myth - there wasn't enough depth here, and the big-picture (post-September 11) ideas never really came together, which I think they should if a novel is to be truly surprising and effective. Very often the author took the easy way out (especially with relation to Mathilda's discovery of her sister's secrets).
For a book that depicts a kid dealing with loss and family secrets in a post-September 11 world, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the kind of book that brings it all together at the end and just blows you away. For a contemporary book about sibling loss, Francine Prose's Goldengrove does it better. Still, I am not sorry that I devoted time to Mathilda's journey. Fast read, but ultimately disappointing.
October 6, 2009
Mathilda Savitch wants to be awful. Like so many adolescent girls, she lies to her parents; steals cigarettes; coerces her friends into illicit activity; riffles through her sibling’s belongings; and ponders that great teenaged imponderable: sex.
What casts her desire to be bad in more uncertain light, however, is the calamity that has produced it: the violent death, a year prior to the novel’s opening, of her older sister, Helene. Emotionally stranded by her parents—torpor-consumed in the wake of Helene’s death—Mathilda’s urgent need to be rescued from her “island of grief” fuels her misdeeds. About the island she wonders, “how large it is and how long it will take me to explore it [and:] how long I’ve been here without even knowing it.” Mathilda Savitch, playwright Victor Lodato’s debut novel, is the log of that exploration, narrated by its namesake in an attempt to navigate and then chart the territory of loss.
Since September 11th, the novel-of-loss-as-experienced-by-precocious-child-narrator has come into particular vogue, from Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which deals explicitly with the World Trade Center attacks) to Marissa Peshl’s blockbuster Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These novels offer the possibility that the unsullied, slightly skewed vision of an innocent will recalibrate the vision of the adult reader—rendering incomprehensibly painful events less painful and more bittersweet via the transformative power of the child’s love and (loss of) innocence. These novels owe almost everything, of course, to Catcher in the Rye, from its originating plot mechanism—it is the death of his little brother, Allie, that is Holden’s undoing—to its supremely voice-driven narrative. And Mathilda Savitch fits neatly into the tradition.
Lodato has a particular gift for voice. As a dramatist (he’s received both a Guggenheim fellowship and NEA funding for his theater work, among other accolades and awards) this should be his métier—dialogue is the sine qua non of theater. And from moment one, Mathilda’s hungry voice, its rhythm and its logic, is the vital, animating force powering the book. “I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not?” she announces, and the reader can��t help but follow along. Whether or not a given reader will find much of thirteen-year-old Mathilda’s insights plausible seems a matter of taste; Lodato indulges with little restraint in observations and ruminations on Mathilda’s behalf—“I wondered why God would open a door only to show you emptiness”—that some may find overly precious, which others will undoubtedly delight in. (Kids do say the darndest things.)
While Mathilda’s ruminations on such diverse subjects as the nature of infinity, why people become terrorists, and the shape and texture of adult desire may grow tiresome, the real difficulty for the novel is not what Mathilda gives voice to but how controlling that voice is, and how little control Lodato has over it. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about Mathilda, Lodato said that “for a long time I felt more like a secretary than a writer, I just let her babble and I wrote everything down that I heard.” Taking dictation from a character is one way for a writer way to enter a story, and one can see how that would be an especially useful method for a playwright. But Lodato, in writing a novel, is bereft of some of the theater’s other gifts: direction and staging; his infatuation with Mathilda’s voice has allowed it to subsume the other essential fictive elements that constitute a whole work.
The novel makes explicit that its events occur in a post-September 11th world, perhaps a very near future. “In our history book, there’s a picture of the burning towers. I was only a kid when it happened, but they don’t let you forget stuff like that,” Mathilda tells us. But beyond that, the novel’s setting is willfully nebulous and vague, both chronologically and geographically. Instead of universalizing the story, or lending it a timelessness that allows it to escape an expiration date, this vagueness flattens the novel, removes it a from a universe in which we might invest ourselves, without providing a compelling substitute. Lodato has lavished so much attention on Mathilda’s voice that he has forgotten the reader’s need to partake in some sensory experience of the novel—something the set would accomplish in a theater production. In Mathilda Savitch there is little to see, to taste, to hear.
This troubling flatness is pervasive in the action as well. The events at hand suffer from a quality of lazy melodrama: Helene meets her death under the wheels of a train; whether she’s been pushed or has killed herself is the novel’s central mystery, the solution to which is embarrassingly prosaic, especially given the overt quirkiness the book relishes in its narrator. The flabbiness of the action and the paucity of texture in the novel make the inclusion of a terrorism motif seem especially cheap. Conveniently for the story, a generalized terrorist attack takes place on the first anniversary of Helene’s death. The novel’s gesture toward a parallel between the two incidents of violence, its half-hearted attempt to comment on the intersection of the historical and the personal (or the political and the personal) is not only easy, but half-baked.
If grief and loss are an island, as Mathilda suggests, then it’s not a desert island, uncharted and undiscovered. If anything, it’s more like an Australia—an enormous continent of an island, its perimeter fairly mapped and populated, but its stark interior less easily inhabited or articulated, so expansive that new and updated information is always welcome. Mathilda Savitch, deprived of too many of the working parts that such an undertaking requires, can provide only a rough accounting of the journey.
What casts her desire to be bad in more uncertain light, however, is the calamity that has produced it: the violent death, a year prior to the novel’s opening, of her older sister, Helene. Emotionally stranded by her parents—torpor-consumed in the wake of Helene’s death—Mathilda’s urgent need to be rescued from her “island of grief” fuels her misdeeds. About the island she wonders, “how large it is and how long it will take me to explore it [and:] how long I’ve been here without even knowing it.” Mathilda Savitch, playwright Victor Lodato’s debut novel, is the log of that exploration, narrated by its namesake in an attempt to navigate and then chart the territory of loss.
Since September 11th, the novel-of-loss-as-experienced-by-precocious-child-narrator has come into particular vogue, from Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which deals explicitly with the World Trade Center attacks) to Marissa Peshl’s blockbuster Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These novels offer the possibility that the unsullied, slightly skewed vision of an innocent will recalibrate the vision of the adult reader—rendering incomprehensibly painful events less painful and more bittersweet via the transformative power of the child’s love and (loss of) innocence. These novels owe almost everything, of course, to Catcher in the Rye, from its originating plot mechanism—it is the death of his little brother, Allie, that is Holden’s undoing—to its supremely voice-driven narrative. And Mathilda Savitch fits neatly into the tradition.
Lodato has a particular gift for voice. As a dramatist (he’s received both a Guggenheim fellowship and NEA funding for his theater work, among other accolades and awards) this should be his métier—dialogue is the sine qua non of theater. And from moment one, Mathilda’s hungry voice, its rhythm and its logic, is the vital, animating force powering the book. “I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not?” she announces, and the reader can��t help but follow along. Whether or not a given reader will find much of thirteen-year-old Mathilda’s insights plausible seems a matter of taste; Lodato indulges with little restraint in observations and ruminations on Mathilda’s behalf—“I wondered why God would open a door only to show you emptiness”—that some may find overly precious, which others will undoubtedly delight in. (Kids do say the darndest things.)
While Mathilda’s ruminations on such diverse subjects as the nature of infinity, why people become terrorists, and the shape and texture of adult desire may grow tiresome, the real difficulty for the novel is not what Mathilda gives voice to but how controlling that voice is, and how little control Lodato has over it. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about Mathilda, Lodato said that “for a long time I felt more like a secretary than a writer, I just let her babble and I wrote everything down that I heard.” Taking dictation from a character is one way for a writer way to enter a story, and one can see how that would be an especially useful method for a playwright. But Lodato, in writing a novel, is bereft of some of the theater’s other gifts: direction and staging; his infatuation with Mathilda’s voice has allowed it to subsume the other essential fictive elements that constitute a whole work.
The novel makes explicit that its events occur in a post-September 11th world, perhaps a very near future. “In our history book, there’s a picture of the burning towers. I was only a kid when it happened, but they don’t let you forget stuff like that,” Mathilda tells us. But beyond that, the novel’s setting is willfully nebulous and vague, both chronologically and geographically. Instead of universalizing the story, or lending it a timelessness that allows it to escape an expiration date, this vagueness flattens the novel, removes it a from a universe in which we might invest ourselves, without providing a compelling substitute. Lodato has lavished so much attention on Mathilda’s voice that he has forgotten the reader’s need to partake in some sensory experience of the novel—something the set would accomplish in a theater production. In Mathilda Savitch there is little to see, to taste, to hear.
This troubling flatness is pervasive in the action as well. The events at hand suffer from a quality of lazy melodrama: Helene meets her death under the wheels of a train; whether she’s been pushed or has killed herself is the novel’s central mystery, the solution to which is embarrassingly prosaic, especially given the overt quirkiness the book relishes in its narrator. The flabbiness of the action and the paucity of texture in the novel make the inclusion of a terrorism motif seem especially cheap. Conveniently for the story, a generalized terrorist attack takes place on the first anniversary of Helene’s death. The novel’s gesture toward a parallel between the two incidents of violence, its half-hearted attempt to comment on the intersection of the historical and the personal (or the political and the personal) is not only easy, but half-baked.
If grief and loss are an island, as Mathilda suggests, then it’s not a desert island, uncharted and undiscovered. If anything, it’s more like an Australia—an enormous continent of an island, its perimeter fairly mapped and populated, but its stark interior less easily inhabited or articulated, so expansive that new and updated information is always welcome. Mathilda Savitch, deprived of too many of the working parts that such an undertaking requires, can provide only a rough accounting of the journey.
March 27, 2013
I picked up this book to read recently and I wish I hadn’t. It’s a coming of age tale with a twist: depressing tale of a mentally disturbed teen who feels responsible for her sister’s suicide because she taunted her in frustration one day to just ‘go ahead and do it’. She lies, she antagonizes, she hurts and she is generally wallowing in misery.
There isn’t anything beautiful, uplifting, or edifying about this book. In addition the pacing is frenzied, as if written by an amphetamine addict.
There isn’t anything beautiful, uplifting, or edifying about this book. In addition the pacing is frenzied, as if written by an amphetamine addict.
November 16, 2012
Reviewed by LadyJay for TeensReadToo.com
Mathilda Savitch believes that her sister, Helene, was murdered - pushed in front of a train by an insane man. The killer is still out there, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
Mathilda's parents seem oblivious to anything except their own pain. Her mother suffers from bouts of depression, finding solace at the bottom of a bottle. Her father tries to maintain a sense of normalcy, but Mathilda knows it is a façade.
She decides to do some investigating of her own. She hacks Helene's email account only to find it empty. She discovers other clues, but they are few and far between. Did one of Helene's many boyfriends become jealous and kill her in a fit of passion? Was someone stalking her?
None of the potential answers add up because Mathilda knows the truth - she has known all along. The problem is accepting that truth......
MATHILDA SAVITCH is Victor Lodato's debut novel. He has created quite an interesting character in Mathilda. She is inquisitive, intelligent, eccentric and, above all else, stubborn. She is the kind of person who doesn't back down. Mathilda questions everything and explores every topic, from religion to relationships to sex.
If you enjoy novels that push boundaries, pick this one up. It will be interesting to see what Lodato comes up with for his next novel. I will be waiting.........somewhat patiently.
Mathilda Savitch believes that her sister, Helene, was murdered - pushed in front of a train by an insane man. The killer is still out there, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
Mathilda's parents seem oblivious to anything except their own pain. Her mother suffers from bouts of depression, finding solace at the bottom of a bottle. Her father tries to maintain a sense of normalcy, but Mathilda knows it is a façade.
She decides to do some investigating of her own. She hacks Helene's email account only to find it empty. She discovers other clues, but they are few and far between. Did one of Helene's many boyfriends become jealous and kill her in a fit of passion? Was someone stalking her?
None of the potential answers add up because Mathilda knows the truth - she has known all along. The problem is accepting that truth......
MATHILDA SAVITCH is Victor Lodato's debut novel. He has created quite an interesting character in Mathilda. She is inquisitive, intelligent, eccentric and, above all else, stubborn. She is the kind of person who doesn't back down. Mathilda questions everything and explores every topic, from religion to relationships to sex.
If you enjoy novels that push boundaries, pick this one up. It will be interesting to see what Lodato comes up with for his next novel. I will be waiting.........somewhat patiently.
July 29, 2009
There's a weird contrast going on in this book: the narrator's voice is rapier sharp, tonally perfect, and highly memorable. But the events that take place seem vague, flabby, and a bit scattershot, and the central incident--the death of the narrator's sister--is handled melodramatically. Still, the keenness of Mathilda's observations and the truths she tells make this one more than worth reading.
October 1, 2009
From page 1, I was hooked on this book. It is a page turner, and the sort of book that you never want to finish; you just want it to go on forever.
The writing style reminded me of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ J.D. Salinger — the main difference being that the narrator is a teenage girl instead of a teenage boy, but in essence, the way the story is told is very similar, especially as both characters also have issues in regard to their mental health. There are also a couple of references in the book to ‘Anne Frank’s Diary’, and again there are similarities in the way this character views the world, and the way it is written is almost like a diary; a teenager documenting events from her life. So although not an entirely original writing style, I feel the author has drawn from very solid, tried and tested, popular works as an inspiration for the style of this book.
The character of Mathilda Savitch is very realistic and the book deals well with how the death of a child affects a family, and in particular how the parents’ grief can affect their other children.
Mathilda is a teenager trying to come to terms with the loss of her sixteen year old sister, and in a typical teenage fashion, she has invented stories to make the death easier to deal with. There is also the element of the child trying to find out more about this sister, who since dying has become more of a mystery, shrouded with some type of immortal quality in the younger sister’s mind.
It’s an entertaining read, and although it deals with some dark subject matter, the way it is seen through the eyes of a child makes it somehow easier to digest. The author deals well with the the naiveté of youth and touches upon some important social issues, including war, terrorism, racism, and suicide.
At a deeper level it appears to be a study into how the world is moving quickly towards an age of intolerance and eventual destruction, and how it could be detrimental to future generations if the danger signs are not picked up in time.
The writing style reminded me of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ J.D. Salinger — the main difference being that the narrator is a teenage girl instead of a teenage boy, but in essence, the way the story is told is very similar, especially as both characters also have issues in regard to their mental health. There are also a couple of references in the book to ‘Anne Frank’s Diary’, and again there are similarities in the way this character views the world, and the way it is written is almost like a diary; a teenager documenting events from her life. So although not an entirely original writing style, I feel the author has drawn from very solid, tried and tested, popular works as an inspiration for the style of this book.
The character of Mathilda Savitch is very realistic and the book deals well with how the death of a child affects a family, and in particular how the parents’ grief can affect their other children.
Mathilda is a teenager trying to come to terms with the loss of her sixteen year old sister, and in a typical teenage fashion, she has invented stories to make the death easier to deal with. There is also the element of the child trying to find out more about this sister, who since dying has become more of a mystery, shrouded with some type of immortal quality in the younger sister’s mind.
It’s an entertaining read, and although it deals with some dark subject matter, the way it is seen through the eyes of a child makes it somehow easier to digest. The author deals well with the the naiveté of youth and touches upon some important social issues, including war, terrorism, racism, and suicide.
At a deeper level it appears to be a study into how the world is moving quickly towards an age of intolerance and eventual destruction, and how it could be detrimental to future generations if the danger signs are not picked up in time.
November 16, 2009
Mathilda Savitch tells the story of her life so far in this odd but engaging and powerful novel. Though not specifically revealed, she would seem to be around 12 or 13, the remaining daughter of parents so grief stricken at the death of their older, 16 year old daughter a year earlier that they are almost dysfunctional, sleepwalking through life and still unable to deal with their loss, and certainly doing a poor job of parenting. Mathilda, one of the most precocious kids you will ever meet between the covers of a novel, decides to act out her frustration, shocking friends and teachers with her behaviour, and confronting her parents with the reality of her sister’s death (she was pushed in front of a moving train). Meanwhile, she manages to access her sister’s email, begins to piece together the last weeks of her life, and slowly narrows the field of potential murderers. Readers who enjoyed The sweetness at the bottom of the pie will find much to savour here, especially the wit and diabolical intelligence of Mathilda. The message is, however, much more serious, as we watch this family so consumed with grief, and follow the fearless attempts of the young protagonist to break through to the truth.
January 11, 2011
I wanted to love this story, especially after it had been compared to Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Mathilda — or "Lufwa" as she'd like to be known — has suffered the loss of a sibling, been emotionally starved by her parents, and communicates in fragments, but that's where the likeness ends.
Like many other reviewers, I felt that the voice in the first half of the book was young, precocious, and sharp but fell apart somewhere between uncovering a handful of emails belonging to her dead sister and begging for the neighbor boy to get all Edward Scissorhands-y with her hair. While the author continued to allude to the events of September 11, 2001, I never really did see how this was a major factor in the story. Mathilda's seemingly antagonistic behavior — usually unprovoked and, occasionally just downright mean — also left me without sympathy for her situation or what may lie ahead for her beyond the pages of the book.
Debut novel... What can I say? Mathilda Savitch is a better novel than I could write, but definitely doesn't compare to The Catcher in the Rye.
Like many other reviewers, I felt that the voice in the first half of the book was young, precocious, and sharp but fell apart somewhere between uncovering a handful of emails belonging to her dead sister and begging for the neighbor boy to get all Edward Scissorhands-y with her hair. While the author continued to allude to the events of September 11, 2001, I never really did see how this was a major factor in the story. Mathilda's seemingly antagonistic behavior — usually unprovoked and, occasionally just downright mean — also left me without sympathy for her situation or what may lie ahead for her beyond the pages of the book.
Debut novel... What can I say? Mathilda Savitch is a better novel than I could write, but definitely doesn't compare to The Catcher in the Rye.
July 18, 2012
Listened to this on tape. Story of a girl who tries to understand her sister's death within a family that won't talk about it. I was totally engrossed.
October 3, 2021
Some brilliant sentences and moments in a sea of mediocrity and cliches.
March 1, 2010
REALLY liked this one. Was an unusal read. I read that the author was a poet and I guess that is why, but the style was very stream of consciousness and was constantly sliding in and out of reality, fantasy and memory. It also felt like the narator was in a fugue state, like if you had to paint them, the image would be out of focus. No hard edges.
The title character is a bit odd, no doubt, but very sympathetic in what she is going through. Her sister died the previous year and her mother has sunk into a deep depression (complete with heavy drinking) because of it and Mathilda is left very lonely, dettached and unsupported. Her entire family is going through the motions and does not talk about their loss, grief or the missing family member. Through all of this, Mathilda is an adolescent in the post 9/11 world where terrorist attacks and war coverage are on TV every day. The terrorist climate is more real to her than her crumbling family and she becomes a little obsessed with planning for apocalypse without the guidance and context her parents should be providing. She is trying to forge friendships and plan for the future and figure out what happened and what to think about her sister's death. But, really she is just floundering and lost. She is filled with conflicting thoughts and emotions about the situation and begins to work through them over the course of the narative. So, in the end, it is a coming of age story, but one with very unique circumstances and which is very artfully told.
The title character is a bit odd, no doubt, but very sympathetic in what she is going through. Her sister died the previous year and her mother has sunk into a deep depression (complete with heavy drinking) because of it and Mathilda is left very lonely, dettached and unsupported. Her entire family is going through the motions and does not talk about their loss, grief or the missing family member. Through all of this, Mathilda is an adolescent in the post 9/11 world where terrorist attacks and war coverage are on TV every day. The terrorist climate is more real to her than her crumbling family and she becomes a little obsessed with planning for apocalypse without the guidance and context her parents should be providing. She is trying to forge friendships and plan for the future and figure out what happened and what to think about her sister's death. But, really she is just floundering and lost. She is filled with conflicting thoughts and emotions about the situation and begins to work through them over the course of the narative. So, in the end, it is a coming of age story, but one with very unique circumstances and which is very artfully told.
October 7, 2014
Mathilda is lost in a world of grief, her sister has just tragically died when hit by a train, her mother and father ignore her and are too wrapped up in their own misery to see how Mathilda is suffering.
They think someone pushed Helene in front of the train but is that the truth?
Mathilda is on a journey of self discovery, trying to make sense out of everything that has happened and also at the same time try too unravel the secret life of Helene because the more she delves into her secrets the more Mathilda finds out that no one really knew the person who was Helene.
Thought provoking, dark and deep this book is aimed at both teenage and also adult audiences at the themes it uses resonates with us all, love, loss, hidden secrets and grief.
Definitely worth reading as you cannot put it down.
They think someone pushed Helene in front of the train but is that the truth?
Mathilda is on a journey of self discovery, trying to make sense out of everything that has happened and also at the same time try too unravel the secret life of Helene because the more she delves into her secrets the more Mathilda finds out that no one really knew the person who was Helene.
Thought provoking, dark and deep this book is aimed at both teenage and also adult audiences at the themes it uses resonates with us all, love, loss, hidden secrets and grief.
Definitely worth reading as you cannot put it down.
July 2, 2013
Mathilda Savitch has a sister that died. Her mother and father are grieving by isolating themselves from Mathilda and leaving her to her own devices -- which isn't such a good idea. In her grief, Mathilda wants to talk about her sister, but it's the one thing her parents won't discuss with her. The synopsis is a bit misleading, but this is a coming of age story in that Mathilda is trying to figure out who she is within her family as it is reshaped by this loss.
The comparison is made to Holden Caulfield, but he is a much more complex character. Also, Mathilda is several years younger than Holden, so the voice is not the same, but it does seem Lodato attempts to emulate Salinger's writing with various phrases.
The comparison is made to Holden Caulfield, but he is a much more complex character. Also, Mathilda is several years younger than Holden, so the voice is not the same, but it does seem Lodato attempts to emulate Salinger's writing with various phrases.
December 1, 2009
I loved this book! Mathilda's voice is so unique - and to think it was written by a grown man. Her voice is unique, but the reader totally understands her thoughts and is drawn into her world. I definitely want to read this again because I think there's something deeper than what I got from reading it the first time. But I absolutely loved this. This is the first book I have LOVED in a long time.
September 7, 2010
I recieved this book free through Goodreads First Reads.
This book is hard to describe...it's unlike anything I have ever read before. It is very intriguing and I really couldn't put it down. There are dark moments and lighter moments. It really gets into a young adults thoughts.
I highly recommend this book!!!!
This book is hard to describe...it's unlike anything I have ever read before. It is very intriguing and I really couldn't put it down. There are dark moments and lighter moments. It really gets into a young adults thoughts.
I highly recommend this book!!!!
March 18, 2010
Wow. This is a dark, comic, devastatingly beautiful take on growing up amidst terrors both real and imagined.
The cover copy/plot summary will give you the bare bones of the story, but there is so much more within these pages. Mathilda is a character who will keep you wondering long after you've turned the last page.
The cover copy/plot summary will give you the bare bones of the story, but there is so much more within these pages. Mathilda is a character who will keep you wondering long after you've turned the last page.
January 15, 2017
A very strong, dark, comic, and ultimately compassionate portrait of a cranky but resilient adolescent girl with a troubled life. Lodato shows a remarkable ability to capture her voice, and it feels authentic and sharply unsentimental. Thought-provoking, moving and often funny, this novel is likely to disturb and offend those who prefer safe and prettified depictions of youth.
November 9, 2009
Such lovely, precise language capturing the adolescent mind wonderings of the precocious Mathilda Savitch, who is dealing with her older sister's death. Her parents have coped with the tragedy by retreating, so Matildha increasingly acts out in the hopes of bringing them back.
April 9, 2010
I couldn't put this book down. Mathilda's voice draws you in from the moment she starts telling her story. Her mind darts around at a furious pace, sometimes hilarious, sometimes gut wrenching, always intelligent and highly entertaining. A very good book.
June 11, 2010
I actually won this book on Goodreads and to my surprise it was GREAT!!! I loved Mathilda and her little attitude and the whole way she explains life/death. This is a great book for both juveniles and adults.
March 12, 2018
I hesitate to give it five stars because I hated the ending, but the voice was incredible, and the plot actually surprised me at parts, so I loved it! Interesting how a man can capture the voice of a tween girl.
January 11, 2011
The voice of this novel was beautiful -- different without being strained or forced. Mathilda draws you into the story and makes you love her for all her wildness and flaws. A stark, honest book that still leaves you feeling hopeful.
March 30, 2015
this book will have your mind spinning. so much sadness and secrets. a young girl trying to come tobgrps with her sister's death, and her parents unwilling or unable to help, no one is really there for her.
October 20, 2009
i couldn't put this book down. it was so beautifully written
Displaying 1 - 30 of 506 reviews