Search - Pure

This one is hard to rate. On one hand it’s a powerful and painful snapshot of what happens when parents suck and a girl has no outlet to create her identity. I really responded to the girl’s emotional blankness and how she wants everything to be perfect, but keeps herself detached from everything that happens to her. I’m also impressed that Ray was sixteen when she started writing it.

It’s not the type of book that you can say you liked because so many horrible things happen, but it’s the type of book that stays with you and gives you the creeps when you think about it, and I think that’s the mark of some seriously good writing. It also made me think about how effed up I was at 14 and some of the decisions I made by choosing not to make a decision at all.

Seriously, if you can make an alcoholic pedophile the good character, you’ve written something really amazing.

Oh, and this is one of those books where the back cover description sucks, sucks, sucks. It's like they tried to describe the book to make it look like it was G Rated when this is a big ole R.

This book honestly made me nauseous. The sexual relationship between the 14-year-old girl and a 30 year old man, really made me sick. The sexuality was gross, especially concerning the situation. The language was also continually offensive. Overall, a bad book. I wouldn't real it again.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, this is NOT. The style of writing is easy to read, but there is offensive language on every page and there are some really disgusting descriptions of sexual activities; the book should certainly be R-rated. Should I have been warned by the words "shocking immediacy" in the blurb and not have ordered it? At any rate, I could not bear to read any further and ended up throwing it away.

This book is raw. It is unnerving. However, I think it's a valuable (and completely real) commentary on how many young girls feel today. An important book for both mothers and daughters.

I don't recommend this book, it wasn't very interesting. Fell very flat for me.

ROM THE PUBLISHER
Pure is about fourteen - the age when you know everything, except when you don't know anything. It's about first love and the end of innocence, and realizing your family perhaps isn't as happy or your parents as together as you thought. It's about the cool friend for whom everything seems effortless, and the impossibly embarrassing friend you're nice to when your cool friends can't see. It's about that twenty-seven-year-old man who flirts with you when he sells your dad your overpriced birthday stereo - except he actually calls. And it's about what happens after.

At first, I had no problem with getting into this story. This is not your typical coming of age story. It's about a 14/15 year old girl, who is dealing with family conflict, peer pressure, sexuality...BUT, while on this journey through teendom, she becomes involved with a 31 year old man. She does not keep this relationship a secret, here parents tolerate it...IT's A BIZARRE STORY. Then ending left me flat. There's all this building and you expect something big to happen and then the ending is just there. It's a good book.