Daddy

Shuttled between her divorced parents' North London homes, Olivia Beckett longs for unconditional love and acceptance, but only her mother's lover seems to have time for her, and his extra attentions spark her sexual awakening. A first novel. 75,000 first printing.

As this provocative novel opens, British teenager Olivia's divorced mother takes in "boarder" Nick. Unlike Olivia's professorial father, Nick is a lewd bloke who favors alcohol, cigarettes, and titillating conversation. Already feeling unloved by her distracted parents, Olivia is further disconnected now that Nick occupies her mother's bedroom. Then the randy photographer seduces the 15-year-old virgin, and Olivia's feelings for Nick turn from disgust to obsession. In the hands of a less capable writer, the steamy plot involving an adult male (who eventually becomes Olivia's stepfather) and a 15-year-old could read like soft-core kiddie porn, but first-novelist Inglis goes beyond the love scenes to forge a compelling albeit disturbing plot, with misguided Olivia as the sympathetic central character searching for adult love. Despite its disappointing, open-ended conclusion, this is a surefire page-turner, a perfect summer read. Sue-Ellen Beauregard

Some readers may feel outrage and others admiration, but none is likely to be ambivalent about this disturbing debut novel. The graphic, sometimes violent and always frightening sexual encounters between Olivia Beckett and photographer Nick Winter explode from what is an otherwise comfortably unremarkable story of divorce, remarriage and coming of age in a middle-class British family. To Olivia, Nick is "the most truly wicked, terrifying person she had ever known and she loved him utterly." But Olivia is only 15, and Nick is her mother's live-in lover. He pursues Olivia much as an animal does its prey--in this case, prey that is increasingly willing to be taunted and then captured. Between sexual knockdowns, Olivia carries on with life as a teenager. She worries about her weight, takes violin lessons, hates her father's new wife, has sex in a cemetery. Unlike Josephine Hart in her comparable Damage , however, in which sexually destructive actions merited consequences, Inglis seems reluctant to call any of her characters to account. While such moral open-endedness will intrigue many, others may have the unpleasant sensation of finding themselves unwilling ringside voyeurs at a particularly nasty sexual circus.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A first novel about the pain of growing up in a broken family that is determinedly shocking, relentlessly readable, and often as adolescent as its protagonist. Olivia Beckett is 14, with the body of a voluptuous woman and the scars of a wounded child. Her parents, acrimoniously divorced, are each involved in new relationships and barely aware of their daughter's unhappy existence moving back and forth between their homes in North London. No one, it seems, wants Olivia. Then comes Nick, her mother's raunchy, rough-edged new boyfriend, who is all too aware of the girl's nubile vulnerability. Olivia, raw and aching from her father's abandonment and her mother's neglect, quickly succumbs to Nick's caresses like a starving animal, offering the author myriad opportunities for over-the-top (and every other position) sex scenes. In between comes some wince- inducing writing: After her father's marriage to wicked stepmother Althea, Nick drives Olivia home and attempts to comfort her: ``She wept, burying her face against his designer shirt. She had a great ache, in her belly, in her heart. She had lost her father.'' (Then comes a sex scene.) A lot of this sounds like the diary entries of a perpetually horny and self-pitying teen--which, of course, Olivia is, but the author, we assume, is not. The sex-with-a-father-figure motif would work much better if the explicit details didn't so totally overwhelm the plot; you have to wonder whether the theme was conceived just to accommodate the sex, and that's too bad, because the book, like Olivia, obviously wants to be more than just a titillating ride. It just doesn't want it enough. Nonetheless, Inglis does manage to convey the destructive yet irresistible power of erotic obsession and, more profoundly, the loneliness, confusion, and sense of displacement that leaves children flailing in divorce's wake. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.