DNF at page 4. Sorry. I am grateful for the free review copy (NetGalley ebook) but let me explain in 4 quotes why I couldn't continue:

"The waterfall meadow, the tissue-paper leaves, the iceberg clouds and diamond rocks, the moon a puddle of dead frogs: looking down from the front steps, I had seen the world in shades of white."

Ok, I'll bite.

"The stars blurred with inexpressible happiness. Why would they do that? Is there any possible ethical justification?"

…. What?

"when I was in fourth grade, my mother and common-law stepfather, Doug, took me there with my common-law stepbrother, Axel."

What even is a common-law relative?

"The ship plowed through low swells, steady as a train. Tormented seagulls tormented my ears with cries of torment, demanding French fries I did not have and would not have wanted to give up. Walleyed, impassive flying fish spoke their silent greetings— patently magical beings, stiff and papery as they outpaced the ship, Arthur’s scaly heralds."

Aaaaand I'm done. Looks like I'm forced to leave a star rating to be able to post this, so it's one star for me.

I found this difficult to get into at first but I persevered with it and I did enjoy it. I didn't particularly take to any of the characters but I was still curious to see how it ended, and what happened to them. A good read nonetheless.

Bran is a teenage girl who has had a very unusual upbringing - under the heat of the California sun, she has worked hard on a farm that's the merest cover for a biker gang. Unaware of who or where her father is, abandoned by her mother, she lives and works under the care of her "common-law stepfather". This upbringing has left Bran somewhat seperated from the world around her, but slowly, under care and tutelage of her friends, she is able to blossom.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a coming-of-age story with which the author has attempted to craft something different - and kind of succeeds! Bran's story is unusual - she's a whizz at manual work but doesn't know how to be a person in society, really - she reminded me a little of the protagonist of Sayaka Murata's Convinience Store Woman. Her so-called family are cruel and neglectful, and so Bran has largely raised herself. In the age-old spirit of found family narratives, however, Bran creates a circle of friends for herself - outrageous Jay, intellectual Peter, and high-strung Fifi. These friendships ebb and flow as Bran ages, and Zink does a great job of how teenage to young adult friendships change, grow or drop away.

The most interesting pairing is Peter & Bran - they ostensibly fall in love, but can never be together for reasons we may or may not choose to believe. Peter opens Bran's mind to the worlds of literature and film, which is as generous as it is life-affirming for the main character. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me get on board with Peter. He's written to be satirical of intellectual snobbishness, I get this, but it felt really basic written down, like Adrian Mole without the humour. I much preferred to hear Bran's thoughts and emotions, and was relieved when Peter dropped out of the narrative.

I think I expected this to be weirder than it was and as a result was somewhat let down by the straightforward plot. Bran is a lovely character, richly drawn and deeply complex, but the novel around her let her down. Self-indulgent in its mockery of intellectualism without being clever, it was frankly just quite boring in these parts. I wanted a lot more about Bran, her journey, and her interiority, wheras she just remained a point of view for most of the book.

I would read Nell Zink again - her writing is lovely, and elements of this book were great. But I found myself drifting in and out of this one, and while it's a short novel, it dragged for me. I didn't hate it by any stretch but I certainly didn't find myself longing to get back to it.

Read if you like: found family, weird girl lit, california narratives, take-downs of intellectualism.

I enjoyed some of this but found other parts boring. The pretentiousness of one of the characters annoyed me to no end and it annoyed me that some of the characters are every word of his. I also felt it ended a bit abruptly, midstory.
Overall, it was just ok.

Bran is pretty well raising herself on a Southern Californian farm that doubles as a plant nursery, biker gang hangout and purveyor of something indefinably dodgy. Her mum has disappeared to a Buddhist retreat and her dad to Australia but she's kept on because she's free labour. Socially awkward and penniless, she pulls together a life at high school, meeting an odd group of friends, predominantly her gay best friend, Jay (who has a hilarious side line in terrible flamenco dancing he thinks is art) and later, dangerously, his friend Peter, pretentious student whose diatribes are full of ellipses where Bran zones out (I found this amusing). As Bran finds her footing, creates alternative family and carves out a job and a home, she negotiates her long-distance non-relationship with Peter but retains a fierce sense of herself, and of herself as a writer, creating screenplays when Jay moves on to making slightly less than terrible films.

Satirising pretentiousness without (I thought) being pretentious, it's essentially a small town coming-of-age novel rather than a Miserable Millennials novel, and the flat, deadpan delivery is a style of narration I really like. Avalon is named after a tourist trap on an island that Bran has visited once, and there are echoes of legend in Peter's thoughts on her, and she also seems to exist for him and Jay as a magical space to project themselves onto.

A thoroughly enjoyable read!

My blog review: https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/book-review-nell-zink-avalon/

3.5 upped to 4
My rating of this book was a bit of rollercoaster as I found some parts brilliant, some so-and-so and some a bit dull.
There's humour, there's satire of high brow intellectualism and alternate lifestyle. There's an unsefferable bore like Peter and a very confused girl like Bran.
I think that the author is a good storyteller and I'm wondering about the next story.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

I absolutely loved this hilarious, bizarre coming-of-age story. Bran is immediately a hugely likeable and relatable character, who I was rooting for throughout the novel. But mostly, I was a big fan of the ironic humour that runs through Zink's writing, and the way you can never quite tell whether certain moments or characters are supposed to be a satire or serious.

Avalon is the story of Bran, abandoned by her parents, she grows up with the Hendersons. The Henderson’s are a criminal family who exploit migrant workers and use Bran as unpaid labour. They are racist bigots and Bran escapes and enters a world of quirky intelligent misfits.
The characters and scenarios are all quirky and too outrageous to be believable with a highly intellectual narrative that seems out of place with some of the characters. But, I guess, believability isn’t really what the novels about. I found I drifted in and out of the book without an attachment to the characters, some sections held my interest whilst I floundered on others.

The novel held so much promise but it was under-developed and failed to mature. There were so many lines and moments that probed into the everyday workings of society and the motivations behind behaviours and were almost revelatory, but they didn’t come together. The ending was abrupt and dissatisfying, and it didn’t reach the emancipation or meaning that the blurb promised.

Avalon follows Bran, a young Californian as she finds freedom from her unconventional upbringing on Bourdon farms where she was manipulate into providing free labour for her entire teenage-hood. It is a story about coming-of-age stories, about finding your freedom in yourself; accepting help from other people, but not letting them define you. I found it charming, heartbreaking, humorous and hopeful.

I decided to read Avalon because the hosts of Literary Friction have spoken before about how good Nell Zink is, and generally I think they have good taste in books. But I was not a fan of this one! I found it weird and boring and it ridiculed pretentious people in such a way that it just became pretentious itself. It improved in the second half when the story became a bit more engaging, but I doubt I'll try another of Nell Zink's books.

Avalon by Nell Zink is a quirky and satirically philosophical coming-of-age novel with a resilient underdog as its narrator. Bran is not having it easy; with a dysfunctional family and unusual upbringing, she was abandoned by first her father and then her mother, one for the promise of Australia and the other for the promise of Buddhist enlightenment. Left under the thumb of her dubious ‘common-law stepfather’, his family, and their threatening friends, and with a somewhat scattered and unreliable group of friends of her own, plus a doomed love interest, it feels like Bran is on a losing streak. However, despite a conflicting pull and loyalty to the people who hurt her, Bran stays afloat and even begins to tread water more vigorously as the novel progresses. Undaunted by the hardship of her circumstances, she sets out to pave her own way in the world and seize her own opportunities.

In Bran Zink has created an endearing character who takes everything thrown at her in her stride, with a mix of earnestness, resilience, and wit. There is definitely a quirkiness to this novel, from the narrator’s unusual family and home circumstances, to the conversation and dynamic within her group of friends, and the other unusual characters they encounter along the way. Despite the novel exploring the darker aspects of family, friendships and relationships, this quirkiness and lightness of touch also ensures the novel is peppered with glimmers of light, and a humorously awkward tenderness does emerge between Bran and her love interest. Rather than finding Bran’s infatuation with the elusive and very ridiculous Peter frustrating, we can’t help but laugh as she throws herself down in despair one minute over her love for him, before picking herself back up and realising she really has better things to be getting on with at that moment. It’s with this attitude that she seemingly manages to find her happy in this whole situation. She is fully self-aware of her predicament in being in love with a fickle, overly-intellectual and often patronising academic, and yet she somehow seems to revel, with a dry sense of humour, in this form of self-torment.

The book is dialogue heavy with lots of philosophical pondering and debate about capitalism, fascism, the power of art, film, and literature, and lots of winding monologues by Peter that often lose not only Bran’s attention but also the reader’s. However, we get a sense that these passages are less about Zink trying to convey lofty ideas through her characters that we are meant to grasp than about her perhaps poking fun at the line between those who talk the talk and those who walk the walk when it comes to creating meaningful change through art in the broadest sense. It’s hard to know really and maybe that’s kind of the idea. She is also conjuring a picture of the confusion of adolescence and young adulthood in a group of friends disillusioned with the world around them, while also being perhaps confused about who they are, what they want and what they are really trying to achieve. While those around her are supposedly seeking to challenge, comment on, and upend the world around them via their views expressed through art or literature, Bran takes a quieter seat, pursuing her art as a means of finally finding her place in the world.

It took me a while to get into the rhythm and writing style of this book; it was a slow burner to start with but, as it moved into the second half, I found my stride and became more invested. This is my first book by Zink, who seems to have quite a distinct voice and sense of humour. While there was something about the rhythm of the book that prevented me from ever getting fully engrossed in it, there were a lot of elements of Zink’s writing that I really did like, and, after reading this, I would be keen to read more by her.

Would have rated 3.5 stars if I could.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my eARC.

The premise of this book really sounded like something that I would enjoy reading, however, I had a really hard time getting into this book and caring about the characters or the story. Maybe it was just bad timing, but I just could not get into it. Might try and pick this up again, and I will certainly try and read the author's other novels which I also have on my to-read list.

Thank you to Netgalley and Faber & Faber for sending me an advanced copy

I really struggled with this title, as I enjoyed parts of it, and it had some very relatable quotes/situations/etc. (one exceptional line was that women are often "too vulnerable to have a sense of humour". But then there was the suggestion that becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood is as easy as "writ[ing] movie scripts and mak[ing] money", with the help of your friend who is "going to be a producer"...). Ultimately, nothing of much note happened; the protagonist was either annoying me or I was feeling sorry for her;, and it wasn't as focused on her survival of a near-cultish upbringing as I thought the blurb suggested it would be. I don't feel like Bran does much searching for - and definitely no finding of - "meaning in her own [life]" either.

Bran's southern Californian upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her "common-law stepfather" on Bourdon Farms - a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school and imagining what life could be like if she had been born into a different family. And then she meets Peter, a beautiful and charming trainwreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for the meaning in her own surroundings.

It did take me a little while to get into this book. A young woman is trying to overcome her new life in Southern California. She is being brought up on a plant farm which is basically a cover for a biker gang. This book certainly taxed by brain. The story is told in an intellectual way. But it could be confusing. Bran is trying to find herself and Peter thinks he knows it all. There is some humour to this story. I have mixed feelings after reading this book.

This is a very unusual novel with a text that’s as intellectual as its characters and not interested in talking down to readers. It won’t be for everyone but I really enjoyed it. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

i really wanted to like this but i found zink's satire on intellectualism grating. her lead is the typical teen girl who doesn't know she is beautiful and is not like other girls. there were several scenes and passages that were meant to be humorous but seemed puerile and unfunny to me.

I got to half way but then decided enough was enough and gave up. Pretentious and yet trite at the same time, this novel fails all the way through. Bran is a disadvantaged young women trying to make her way out of her bleak circumstances and does so by getting involved with some waste-of-space yet more privileged and better educated but certainly not “better” peers, none of whom are likable and the writing was such that I had trouble differentiating between them And Bran herself isn’t likeable either so I didn’t really care what happened to her. Or to any of them. Not for me, this one.

Whilst this was a quick read, I sadly didn’t find it very enjoyable. The author seemed to want to to ridicule middle class artistic elitism whilst still revelling in it herself. The character of Bran isn’t developed enough to really sympathise with and pretty much everyone is dislikable or behaves with suspect motivation.

I don’t know if it speaks more to an American readership but I just found it self-indulgent.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Faber and Faber for an arc of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I really couldn’t get to grips with the high register of the narrative voice in this novel, and found the start particularly confusing while also being quite boring. Unfortunately I had to give up after a couple of chapters.