Okay, so if there's one element in this book that will tell you whether or not this book is for you, it's this: there's a scene in a biology class where the kids are ruthlessly bullying this girl for her big nose, so she hops on the lab table and dares one of the boys to give her a nose job with a scalpel, and he makes the first cut until the heroine suffers a pang of conscience for being a passive observer to all this and sets the guy on fire with the scalpel.
THE ADULTS was on a list of books for people who liked MY DARK VANESSA and it certainly has the fucked-up girl getting predated on by older men themes right, as well as the fucked-up coming of age story elements. I was prepared for both of those things. I think the problem is that it felt like the author didn't really know where she was going with all of this bad stuff. The whole book felt like a big trauma dump with one thing happening after another, and it also felt like neither I nor the main character were given any time to process any of it.
The writing is not bad and in fact the beginning of the book is very good, but I did not like the story and all of the characters were kind of awful, and reading this book just gave me a very terrible, claustrophobic feeling that was not at all engaging or fun. If that was the purpose of this book, to whip the tablecloth off the ugliness of a small New England town, she achieved her purpose. But I think a closer comparison for this book would be Rick Moody's THE ICE STORM than MY DARK VANESSA, or PREP and ELECTION, as the two latter were comped in the blurb.
2 out of 5 stars
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