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Product Description
Irini Spanidou's highly praised first novel, God's Snake, introduced a writer of rare perception and a character, Anna Karystinou, with whom readers fell in love. In Fear, the author returns to Anna as she comes of age.
It is now 1959, and thirteen-year old Anna is a perpetual newcomer, moving from place to place with her family. Her father, a demanding army colonel, has raised her to be invulnerable and proud. But Anna's confident air belies her anxiety as she grapples with her burgeoning sexuality, and begins an uneasy friendship with the smug and challenging Veronica Koroneou. When Anna learns that a serial killer is preying on young women nearby, she is lured toward the sourch of her terror. From a unique and brutally honest angle, Fear is an unflinching protrait of a girl's difficult transition into womanhood.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Amazon.com Review
Irini Spanidou's second novel, Fear, begins in June 1959, and ends one year later. In between, Spanidou chronicles the evolution of young Anna Karystinou during her 13th year. Daughter of an army colonel and his Egyptian-born Greek wife, Anna is used to moving around a lot, but Thessaloniki is different:
In the small villages near outposts where she had lived year after year, the village children came out in force and besieged her. They may have shown hostile curiosity at first, staring at her silently in challenge, but in the end were quick enough to say the first word. In the week since she had lived on this street, these children had treated her with pointed indifference--the once-over dismissive glance that lingers just long enough to jab. Friendless, at odds with her unhappy mother, and entering into the choppy waters of puberty, Anna is poised for her life "to change once and for all." And when she meets Veronica Koroneou at school, it seems the catalyst has arrived. Adolescence, a new school, the discord between her parents, and her father's ongoing attempts to mold Anna into an ideal "son" are just a few of the traumas that Spanidou's heroine must face during the course of this novel. Divided into sections such as "Two Days in June," "Three Days in September," "Eleven Days in December," etc., Fear intensifies the experience of growing up by telescoping it into a few short days. And lurking always in the background is "the Dragon," a mysterious serial killer who serves to amplify a young girl's greatest fear: the consequences of being a woman. Spanidou is masterful at evoking the rage, alienation, intense loneliness, and periodic euphoria of adolescent girls. Though set in Greece, this strong tale is universal. --Alix Wilber
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