Eliza Robertson. (2018). Demi-Gods: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Eliza Robertson. 2018. Demi-Gods: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Eliza Robertson, Demi-Gods: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Eliza Robertson. Demi-Gods: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Robertson, Eliza
   • bioText: Eliza Robertson attended the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2011 Man Booker Scholarship. In 2013, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize and the Journey Prize. Her first story collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award and selected as a New York Times Editor's Choice. In 2015, she was named one of five emerging writers for the Writers' Trust Five x Five program. She lives in Montreal.
     
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Demi-Gods

fullDescription

A bold debut novel for fans of Emma Cline's The Girls and Edan Lepucki's California—a story of love, lust, and the spaces in between, from a "captivating" (NYTBR) new voice in fiction.
It is 1950, and nine-year-old Willa's sheltered childhood is about to come to an end when her mother's beau arrives with his two sons to her family's summer home in British Columbia. As Willa's older sister pairs off with the older of these boys, Willa finds herself alone in the off-kilter company of the younger, Patrick. When, one afternoon, Patrick lures Willa into a dilapidated rowboat, Willa embarks upon an increasingly damaging relationship with Patrick, one that will forever reconfigure her understanding of herself.

Demi-Gods traces the tumultuous years of Willa's coming-of-age as she is drawn further into Patrick's wicked games. Though they see each other only a handful of times, each of their encounters is increasingly charged with sexuality and degradation. When Willa finally realizes the danger of her relationship with Patrick, she desperately tries to reverse their dynamic, with devastating results.

Daring, singular, and provocative, Demi-Gods announces the arrival of one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary literature.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: [A] lush, subtle novel . . . Robertson conjures a languid world, a Didion-esque tumble-dry of summery whites. The book is of a piece with André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name and other soft-core explorations of how we mess one another up, and realize it only later. Rarely have blurred lines . . . been explored with such grace.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Wall Street Journal
   • content: Demi-Gods reminded me favorably of novels like Deborah Levy's Swimming Home and Emma Cline's The Girls, where a hazy, swollen summer ambiance is sliced through by the razor-wire of menace and illicit arousal . . . Ms. Robertson's writing is compact, barbed and often startling . . . one of the most memorable first novels I've read in 2018.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: Set in both British Columbia and Southern California, Robertson's searing debut novel (following the story collection Wallflowers) is a richly layered coming-of-age story exploring the thrills and dangers of a young girl named Willa and her adolescent sexual awakening . . . Robertson's deliciously enigmatic style is the perfect analogue to Willa's absorbing yet deeply haunting journey of self-discovery.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Financial Times
   • content: Atmospheric and lushly detailed, Demi-Gods captures the wonder and menace of adolescence in ways both unsettling and profound.
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Globe and Mail, "Best Books of 2017"
   • content: Its nod to the classics makes Demi-Gods comparable to Donna Tartt's The Secret History. As does the feeling of a new and important author arriving.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Daily Express
   • content: Wallflowers, Robertson's 2014 collection of short stories, established her as one of [Canada]'s most-talented young writers. In her sly, sexually charged coming-of-age novel Demi-Gods, a young girl and her older step-brother fall into a peculiar, and perhaps sinister, relationship.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Sunday Times
   • content: Eliza Robertson has followed her 2015 collection of short stories, Wallflowers, with a debut novel that is gripping, original and richly descriptive, full of perceptive observations of sibling dynamics. It also builds tension underneath the saccharine surface of 1950s suburbia, conjuring the atmosphere of a breathlessly hot summer's day shortly before a storm breaks, amid the growing tension about where Patrick's dark games will lead. A daring page-turner to devour in one sitting. ****
8. • premium: False
   • source: Quill & Quire
   • content: Her skill as a writer is beyond question: every sentence feels crafted and she evokes America in the 1950s with such care that it seems to swim before the reader's eyes like a heat haze.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Prima, "Books of the Year"
   • content: In her poetic, essential debut novel, Eliza Robertson aims an unflinching gaze at the temptation and consequences of weaponized desire. Demi-Gods is a brutally beautiful coming-of-age story that sings with language as lovely, wild, and full of ominous longing as the young woman at its center.
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 28, 2017
      Robertson’s vivid but somewhat choppy debut novel (following her short story collection, Wallflowers) is set in the 1950s, and moves between a summer cabin on a British Columbia island and California. When nine-year old Willa’s mother’s new lover’s two sons come from California to visit Salt Spring Island, Willa and her sister Joan’s lives are transformed. Joan, 12, is immediately attracted to and later pairs off with the older brother, Kenneth, who is about 15 at the start of the novel, while 11-year old Patrick captivates and sometimes repels Willa. Willa’s attraction to Patrick leads him to wield a special and somewhat sinister power over her, and as they grow up, the sexual tension and silent power struggles engulf not just this pair but also the adults. One of the novel’s strengths is that it doesn’t see teenage sexuality as something to be feared; it beautifully captures the mixture of excitement, enjoyment, and alarm that accompanies discovery and sets it against a series of sunwashed, Instamatic-filtered summers. Robertson’s short fiction has won a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her strengths at that length appear here too: wonderful cinematic detail, precise character observation, and pithy insights into the strong relationship between the two sisters. But novels require something more, and this one falls short of feeling cohesive, with too many characters coming across as shadowy or sketchy. The various episodes, sometimes separated by years, are not convincing enough to work as fragments of a whole. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2018
      A strange boy from San Diego enters the life of a Canadian girl in 1950 and leaves it in 1961, inspiring a lifelong fascination.Robertson's (Wallflowers, 2014) debut novel is narrated by Willa, who is 9 when her story begins on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. This is when she meets Patrick, one of two brothers who arrive with their father from San Diego for a visit. The father is dating her mother, the older brother and Willa's sister are heading for romance, and she is drawn immediately into the weird, faintly perverted aura of the younger boy, Patrick, who gets her involved in humiliating, painful, and/or frightening episodes every time he appears, variously involving a stinging jellyfish, an eviscerated rabbit, and his genitals. Willa is a Didion-esque narrator, and the novel has a strong memoiristic feel: "Everything I knew of California I learned when I was twelve--the blue desert, Valencia oranges, the smell of hot tires, my sister in an Orlon sweater, the woman who stole a plastic flamingo from our hotel, the surf gods, egg rolls from Fat City, sand in my swim costume, all the convertibles on Ocean Beach that parked to watch the sun duck under." By 1957, at the wedding of their sister and brother, Willa and Patrick are locked into their dark dynamic. She watches him with another girl in a car, pushing "his finger inside her underwear," looking "like a dentist probing for a cavity." Then he dances with Willa, tracing her upper lip with his fragrant finger. The climactic encounter occurs in '61, on a sailing trip with their married siblings down the coast of Baja California. Willa is in her second year at the University of Victoria; Patrick has graduated from Cornell; bad things will happen. A final section set in 2001 reflects on the impact of these long-ago incidents on Willa's life.Elegant sentences in search of a plot wander through a series of dramatic incidents and reflections on the power of the male gaze.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2018
      

      It's easy to understand why Willa's coming of age is troubled: her parents are separated, her mother's new beau Eugene is controlling and intense, and her mother is unhappy, self-destructive, and alcoholic. When Eugene's sons, lean and tanned, come to stay at Willa's family's summer home on Salt Spring Island, BC, nine-year-old Willa is intrigued. But something is off with Patrick: he burns moths with a magnifying glass and manipulates Willa into repeated acts of degradation. Willa is both repulsed and fascinated by him, and the novel chronicles their increasingly twisted relationship. Set in the 1950s, the narrative includes compelling period details and commentary about societal gender expectations. Unfortunately, while the author may have been shooting for something daring, sexy, and literary, she isn't successful. Her characters are universally unlikable; the timeframe jumps illogically; horrific events become gratuitous. VERDICT This first novel by an award-winning short story writer (Wallflowers) is a big ball of yuck trying too hard to be artful and provocative, piling one disturbing scene on top of another. Some readers may find it titillating, but others will say "enough."--Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 15, 2018
      Robertson's first novel opens in 1950, when nine-year-old narrator Willa is fascinated by the sons of her depressive alcoholic mother's new boyfriend, a not-very-likable man she calls Uncle Eugene. While golden-boy Kenneth has already glommed on to Willa's beautiful older sister, as most boys do, the intriguingly dark Patrick seems all for Willa. In episodic snippets over several years, Robertson, who received accolades for her short story collection, Wallflowers (2014), follows Willa's coming-of-age in various spots along the West Coast, leading up to an explosive moment shared by the two brothers and two sisters. With immediacy that's at the same time veiled in the haze of memory, Willa projects a sort of film of the most vivid, often also the most disturbing, moments of her past. Her narration is heavy with metaphors, realistically vague, and rife with sexual imagery and first experiences. There's only a loose sense of plot, and by the book's end, in the present day, readers won't be sure they even know Willa yet, making language, mood, and setting the primary draws here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 19, 2018
      Set in both British Columbia and Southern California, Robertson’s searing debut novel (following the story collection Wallflowers) is a richly layered coming-of-age story exploring the thrills and dangers of a young girl named Willa and her adolescent sexual awakening. The novel takes the form of an impressionistic montage of Willa’s memories, in which she retrospectively interrogates her formative years, beginning in the summer of 1950 when she is nine years old. Willa’s hard-drinking and distant mother invites her Californian boyfriend and his two sons, Kenneth and Patrick, to stay at the family’s Salt Spring Island, B.C., beach house. Willa and her 12-year-old sister, Joan, are left to fend for themselves while the two parents are largely distracted by their own bickering, and while Joan and Kenneth form an immediate bond—they will marry only seven years later—Willa and Patrick’s relationship develops over the subsequent decade through a series of increasingly fraught and experimental sexual encounters and shared secrets, culminating in a devastating tragedy off the San Diego coast that severs their intimate yet often twisted bond. Willa’s memories, from the vantage point of four decades after the accident, map her gradually becoming aware of her own body and how the repercussions of untamed desire can shape futures. Robertson’s deliciously enigmatic style is the perfect analogue to Willa’s absorbing yet deeply haunting journey of self-discovery.

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A bold debut novel for fans of Emma Cline's The Girls and Edan Lepucki's California—a story of love, lust, and the spaces in between, from a "captivating" (NYTBR) new voice in fiction.
It is 1950, and nine-year-old Willa's sheltered childhood is about to come to an end when her mother's beau arrives with his two sons to her family's summer home in British Columbia. As Willa's older sister pairs off with the older of these boys, Willa finds herself alone in the off-kilter company of the younger, Patrick. When, one afternoon, Patrick lures Willa into a dilapidated rowboat, Willa embarks upon an increasingly damaging relationship with Patrick, one that will forever reconfigure her understanding of herself.

Demi-Gods traces the tumultuous years of Willa's coming-of-age as she is drawn further into Patrick's wicked games. Though they see each other only a handful of times, each of their encounters is increasingly charged with...

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