Reviews for Mathilda Savitch

The average rating for Mathilda Savitch based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-14 00:00:00 Angelique Long 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-09 00:00:00 TIM BODIFORD 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.