Although it contains some promise, Avalon is too sprawling and rambling to really find its footing, losing any decent ideas into a mulch of weak pacing, and confused concepts.

I found this an unusual read but I did enjoy it. The story follows Bran who is abandoned by her mother who joins a Buddhist colony and left with her stepfather. I'm not sure I understood everything in this coming of age story but I was intrigued by the characters and glad to have read it.

Unfortunately I read this when long-term sick last year and so while I noted a star rating, at the time I didn't have capacity for reviews for everything I was reading, and am only now just getting round to giving my feedback. Sorry that's not super helpful

It did nothing for me unfortunately. The story is a bit confusing but is well written, just not to my taste.

Did not finish this one, I found it hard to get into, maybe the story was just difficult or the language.

Avalon is a weirdly unconventional Californian coming-of-age story.

Our protagonist, Bran, “a grubby Audrey Hepburn in overalls”, is not living her best life. Under the heat of the baking sun, since her early years, she is made to labour hard on the home farm and plant nursery that's barely a veneer for a biker gang's criminal activities.

Bran’s mother abandoned her to search for enlightenment and live an alternative lifestyle in a Buddhist retreat, leaving her in the care (or lack thereof) of her "common-law stepfather” and extended family. Her father had long since emigrated to Australia, never to make contact again.

Her family, despite Bran’s protestations to the contrary, are cruel and neglectful, so she has pretty much raised herself.

In the typical spirit of these kinds of reads, socially awkward Bran creates a tight-knit circle of friends for herself - unconventional Jay, intellectual Peter, and high-strung Fifi.

While her friends are all heading off to college, Bran finds her horizons are limited by penury - until she falls for the scholarly Peter. Now, obviously, Peter and Bran form a deep connection, but they’re not able for being together for reasons we may or may not choose to believe.

Bran is an endearing character who takes everything thrown at her in her stride, with a heady blend of naive earnestness, resilience, and dark humour, but the story around her falls flat.

The book is heavy going with lots of philosophical pondering and debate about capitalism, fascism, the power of art, film, and literature, strewn with lots of waffling monologues that often lose both Bran’s attention and the reader’s.

This book was bizarre but not weird enough for that to be a redeeming feature. There was no real discernible plot. I'm not entirely sure I even understand what I read, and for a relatively short book, it seemed to drag, taking me quite a few days to finish. I never DNF, but I sadly was tempted at several points along this read. 2.5⭐

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this eARC. As always, this is an honest review.

I will buy this book to finish later, as I did not manage to finish this in time - I believe that I got it late in the window before the pub date, and therefore it was archived too quickly.

I didn't get this book at all. I stuck with reading it, purely hoping I'd get it, but it wasn't as I expected, resulting in disappointment. I can see why some readers might deem this as enjoyable. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t for me.

Nell Zink has written a great book. I enjoyed the clever thought provoking language, the characters & the use of humour.

Unusual and engaging coming of age story, featuring modern day slavery, emancipation and humorous youthful literary pretentiousness.

Abandoned by her mother when she joins a Buddhist colony, 10 year old Bran finds herself living with her "common law" step-father. The plant nursery she is made to work for is also a cover for a biker gang. Fellow school misfit Jay is her closest and longest friend. He later introduces her to college student Peter who shares her love of literature and together Bran looks for meaning and her place in life.

A rather tedious story, with overblown, unbelievable characters. I persevered, thinking it might improve, but was disappointed.
I did like the descriptive passages, when the irritating characters weren’t actually speaking.
I found Zink's prose far too heavy for my taste, I consider myself to have a fairly good vocabulary, but time after time I found myself looking up obscure words - I’m not sure why the author does this, it almost seems like showing off!
Far too pretentious for me - maybe I didn’t “get it”….(and if I read the word “fascist” used wrongly again, I may scream…)

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this book for review.

This is typical of Zink's story telling .. Good, thoughtful and startling writing in imagery and characterisations .. but too digressive and troublesome in working out of over cooked relationships .. coming of age sure, is unique but not that singular per person .. her mother leaves her with a stepfamily, and so Bran knows about distanced relations .. I couldn't ever put that out of mind (how dreadful her selfish mother has been to her!) .. anyway I enjoyed Zink's accomplished writing but was not sufficiently engaged even to finish!

Full of interesting observations and clever insights, I found myself thinking about this book - and the main characters - long after I put it down. I struggled through the middle section, but there are huge rewards for the reader who perseveres.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I was intrigued by the premise of this novel but the writing style didn't quite agree with me. Zink's prose is a bit heavy for my taste and I didn't really like any of the characters - I have absolutely zero clue why Bran would be so obsessed with Peter. However, it's an interesting story and a viewpoint you don't see that often in literature.

I do occasionally enjoy a literary fiction novel that takes me to another place and shows me a new way of life, while being somehow relatable. That’s what I wanted from this book and in some ways, it delivered.

After her mother joined a Buddhist colony, Bran was raised by her common-law stepfather on a plant nursery that is also a hangout for local bikers. While dreaming of a different life and spending time with her band of misfit friends, Bran meets Peter, a college student who introduces her to art and literature and they begin an ill-fated relationship. Bran spends the next few years trying to find her place in the world.

The book has a very dry sense of humour that did make me laugh a few times but it was always tinged with tragedy, which stoppered the comedy. Bran really has been abandoned by the very people who were supposed to take care of her and I did find it heartwarming that she could see the funny side of it.

The big love of Bran’s life is perhaps her gay best friend, Jay. I really felt that hopeless yet still delusionally hopeful feeling of unrequited love emanating from her and I loved how Bran’s confession that she loved Jay didn’t tamper their friendship. She just quietly understood that they couldn’t ever be together in the way that she wanted and carried on being in his life in any way that she could.

Bran was escaping into books before Peter came along, so I didn’t really know what Peter brought to her life. It’s not like he opened up the idea of reading and creativity for her. Bran sees herself as a ‘world in trouble’ and I think that encapsulates her life perfectly. There is a lot of uncertainty and very few prospects open to her because of the manner in which she has been raised.

The men at the nursery treat Bran like a maid rather than her stepfather’s ward. She gets into some really scary situations around them and I actually think she was pretty strong to come out of them as level-headed as she did. I really didn’t know what would become of her but I had my fingers crossed that she wouldn’t become a product of her environment.

This is why I was so frustrated when she is called back to the nursery to take care of her ailing grandfather. Her stepfather can’t possibly do it (probably because nursing is a woman’s job) and Bran is the only person who can ever look after him. This happens just as Bran has left the place and is finally discovering what she could be. The fact that she acquiesces broke my heart because it just proved that she is riddled with loyalty that her family don’t deserve. However, sacrificing her fledgling self-discovery felt like a very authentic thing to do. Many of us are far too weak to resist the pull of family when they call.

Avalon is a brief glimpse of a girl’s story to rise from the ashes of her upbringing. I did lose interest around halfway through, which I’m sad about because it isn’t a long book. I hated Bran and Peter’s relationship, which I think was the intention but I wasn’t convinced of that intention most of the time. However, I was very pleased with the ending and finished it full of hope.

While full of pretentous characters who think they're much smarter than they really are (as many twenty-odd year olds do), I did enjoy this book. It reflected a lot of my own struggles of leaving behind what I knew as home in search of something bigger, but took on a character arc I've not seen often, where the writer intentionally starts of with an interesting character feeling isolated from the world, and makes her conform to society and become, literally, a 'basic bitch.' Unfortunately, I think the constant references to other texts could only work so much, and by the end of the book felt over-done. Additionally, if the references are unfamiliar to the reader, then the entire exchange is rendered meaningless and makes the characters' pseudo-intellectualism more frustrating than endearing.

An unusual but enjoyable read although I found some of the students' political intellectualism a little grating at times. The slightly odd structure, with the end coming in chapter one, added to the unusual feel of the story but I went back and read chapter one again, which helped!

COMING OF AGE tales are nothing new, but one that doesn’t really have a structure or even a conclusive ending is a bit more unusual. Bran has grown up on a plant farm in California that acts as a front for the criminal dealings of the family that has raised her, more or less, since her mother left her with them years before in order to join a Buddhist colony in the mid-west.
Bran’s accommodation consists of a rickety lean-to and she earns her keep by washing insecticide off topiary plants in order to pass them off as organic. She is the only female presence in the testosterone-fuelled environment, which boasts her “common-law step-father”, his low-key violent son and boorish father, who is the de facto leader of a biker gang.
She manages well at school, and falls in with out-cast Jay, with the pair later taking up with the three members of the under-looked school paper, fellow misfits who are willfully estranged from their peers. All of them come from comfortable home environments and are mystified by Bran’s upbringing.
When they graduate and go their separate ways to universities around the country, Bran is left behind to figure out what to do next. On their first break from classes Jay brings back a new classmate Peter, a know-it-all intellectual who Bran immediately falls for. He concocts a plan for her to better herself by focusing on her strengths and ambitions, which she does.
One plus about her unconventional background is that her imagination has never been quenched, and because her friends have always been privileged enough to pursue left-field interests like modern dance as a college major, she doesn’t balk at going down the road less travelled.
As well as that, Bran is a young woman who falls on her feet. When she reaches the end of her tether after one too many casual almost-assaults, she flees to her friend Will’s house, where she is taken in by his well-off, liberal parents who just want the best for this person in whom they see potential.
Although it sounds like this is a typical coming-of-age story, told linearly and with a coherent plot to steer Bran’s story along, it isn’t. The narrative rambles and flows into crevices and up-hill, not really going anywhere, only wherever Bran happens to be at the time.
It also sounds pretty grim and harrowing, and again it is not. It is funny and bizarre, and Bran is a great protagonist, letting life happen around her as she looks out for a way to slip into all the moving parts without getting caught in the cogs.
The reference to Avalon is equally as oblique. Rather than the mythical Arthurian island, it is an island of the same name that Bran visits with her mother and step-father as a young girl, a lasting good memory of summer sunshine and ice-cream. Its name ignites a fascination in Bran, for mystical places like it and Tír na nÓg and Hy-Brasil that are there but not, utopian ideals just out of reach.
The plantation in California is just about the opposite of Avalon, so it makes sense that Bran would continue to seek out a place she knows doesn’t exist, but can be created by herself, her friends, her love-interest Peter just by letting their imaginations loose.
When Jay realises that his talents lie in storytelling of a more traditional manner, he changes his major from dance to film, and enlists Bran as un-credited help with coming up with scripts, concepts and with acting in the short films he must make for class.
They make a good team, and Bran is noticed even though she is not technically enrolled in college. Her unabashed ideas are unfiltered and admired and envied by Jay’s teachers and peers, and she finds herself independently pursuing screenwriting.
Towards the end of this relatively unstructured, funny insight into the motivations and thoughts of an odd but endearing person, Bran accepts an invitation from Peter to join him at a mentor’s cabin. It’s around here that a sense of foreboding enters, but it’s hard to trust the breadcrumbs the author knowingly lays. But, like the rest of the book, the idea is to go with it, to see what unfurls, which may be what you’d naturally predict or could be something else entirely.

Round up to 3 1/2 for the writing, which is - as usual - really, really good. This also might be her most accessible work so far.

Unfortunately this book didn’t really capture me in any way. I continued reading hoping to get something from it, it’s an easy read and I’m sure it will be a big hit for some but just not for me this time. Thanks to the author, Faber and faber and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this.