Reviews for The Saskiad

The average rating for The Saskiad based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-31 00:00:00 Renata Kaps This is a novel that's all about story, which is as you might expect for a tale that bears so many subtle homages (most of which I through ignorance missed) to The Iliad. In the early chapters of the novel our 12-year-old heroine, Saskia -- growing up in what remains of a Long Island commune, presided over by her self-absorbed New Ager mother Lauren -- is so completely absorbed in her favourite books that her experience of life is at least half the time fantasticated almost beyond recognition. Hall manages to convey this through a narrative that could at any moment have flown off the rails into incomprehensibility but somehow remains not just clear but vivid; it's an extraordinarily impressive trick, and I am very jealous. (This is not a book that I can imagine loses a shred of its impact if you know the bones of the plot in advance, so I'm happily going to divulge them. If you're one of those people who refuse to read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" because you already know how it turns out, skip ahead, please, to my notes on book #84.) The intensity of the prose drops off after this as we get into the tale's main plot. Saskia, whose intelligence and oddballery make her always the outcast at school, befriends newcomer Jane Singh, an Anglo-Indian who's a year older but in Saskia's class. The two revel in each other's fantasy worlds. One day a card arrives from Saskia's father, Thomas, who abandoned the commune when Saskia was a toddler, inviting her and Lauren on a trip to Scandinavia to take part in a Greenpeace-like project protecting a threatened river. Lauren declines to go, so everyone agrees that Jane can go in her place. The main part of the book takes place on that Scandinavian excursion, while it becomes ever clearer to us that Thomas is a fount of deception; the increasingly improbable, always self-aggrandizing tales he tells about himself and his exploits are in their way as fantasticated as Saskia's mental adventures in the worlds of Captain Hornblower, Tycho Brahe, Odysseus and the rest, but are very significantly more dangerous -- especially to the two impressionable adolescents, who take what he says at face value. Saskia of course sees nothing of this: he is the wondrous father who was for so long lost to her, now returned to her life. His frequent spoilt-brat behaviour seems to her to be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the actions of the fools and scoundrels who surround him. Because Thomas and Jane are the most precious people in Saskia's life, she essentially throws the two of them at each other . . . and we discover that paedophilia is another of Thomas's enchanting traits. The affair between Thomas and Jane continues even after Thomas "reluctantly" comes back to live on the commune, and even after he has regained Lauren's bed. At one stage he comes within a whisker of bedding Saskia herself, but what must be his solitary surviving scruple dissuades him at the last moment. And slowly, as Thomas's fits of temper become ever more frequent and ever more infantile, Saskia begins to realize that this supposed angel is truly a monster. In the final major section of the book she escapes the commune to New York, where (and again this is a neat trick for Hall to pull off), in order to survive, she somehow manages to exploit her sexuality and the gullibility of young males without ever quite losing that feisty, imaginative, intelligent spark that makes her such an appealing character -- without losing her integrity, if you will. Eventually home calls her, and she returns to the commune, where, while still in essence the same Saskia as she was before she left for the Scandinavian trip, she very swiftly re-evaluates the people there, discovering that her mother's boyfriend Bill (back on the scene after Thomas's latest departure) is far from the oaf she thought he was; that her younger quasi-siblings are people in their own right, with character-strengths of their own, rather than just the "crew" to be bossed around; and so forth. A fair number of comments I've seen about The Saskiad describe it as a coming-of-age tale, but my own feeling is that this is an inaccurate description -- or at least a misleading one. Saskia's adventures haven't filled her with a new confidence-of-self or made her into a somber, grounded young adult: her tale has, rather, been a sort of voyage back to the beginning. Of course she's older and more knowledgeable, and better able to understand the world, but in the most important sense -- the shipmate-of-Hornblower-on-moment-and-assistant-to-Tycho-the-next sense, she hasn't changed at all. It's as if she's discovered that she doesn't need to come of age. All in all, a very disturbing book -- at least for this reader -- but one that I value having read and will, I'm sure, remember for a long while. Incidentally, the PW review of The Saskiad, as cited on the book's Amazon page, must be one of the least accurate even PW has ever published. It's as if the reviewer read a brief outline of the book and then winged it from there, filling in the details with suppositions based on what the plots of template coming-of-age novels are supposed to be. One of the great strengths of this novel is that it breaks quite a lot of the rules, so the reviewer's description ends up looking pretty goddam silly.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-16 00:00:00 Josiah Grimmitt [What follows is my original review of this book, which I posted to Amazon.com (which was pretty new back then!) on July 22, 1997. I haven't re-read the book since then, but I remember writing this, and stand by the comments.] I teach English to secondary school students, and started The Saskiad with high hopes, overjoyed at the prospect of being able to recommend it to students. However, as I read it, I became convinced that it is NOT an appropriate book for any but the most mature teenagers. While Hall writes beautifully, the characters (especially Saskia) are captivating, and the structure is imaginatively conceived, I can recommend it only to adult readers, and even then with reservations. It is intriguing, and the first two segments are wonderful, but the dark underbelly of this story--although it is a valid match for the literary theme of lost innocence--is not something I would want a teenager to read without support from another reader. There certainly are some teens who can handle it without difficulty, though; if you are considering selecting this book for your teenager, think about that reader's maturity and open-mindedness. Topics include pedophilia (Jane is only 13-14), drugs, and promiscuity, and the text even makes a liminal examination of incest. Selecting interesting and challenging new literature for intellectually adventurous teenagers is extremely difficult, and I am always wary of those who would censor works that stretch the bubble of acceptibility. In good conscience, though, I must state my caveat to any parent or person who thinks that this is a thoroughly harmless and gentle coming-of-age novel. It is harsh in a way that is literarily challenging but also (potentially) emotionally challenging. Caveats aside, Hall's overall effort makes for an interesting read. Saskia's fantasy incursions into her literary world might be confusing at first (narrative shifts tend to be), but it is worth the effort to get into this novel.