[b:Very Cold People|58082210|Very Cold People|Sarah Manguso|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1637603379l/58082210._SY75_.jpg|81125603] is a novel by [a:Sarah Manguso|52289|Sarah Manguso|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631212603p2/52289.jpg] which describes the tormented New England childhood of a youngster told in first person vignettes in a deadpan style. She is the only child of unloving, somewhat odd parents. Her suffering is revealed in her behavioral peculiarities (not eating, pulling out her eyelashes, peeling fingernails, silences). Her parents respond unexpectedly, sometimes cruelly, yet they throw birthday parties for her and she enjoys swimming, skating, piano lessons and acting in the school play. Despite their penuriousness and devotion to thrift shops, they live in a nice house with "three porches and a balcony" in a good neighborhood. Various childhood traumas with the narrator's friends are described and make up a thread common to many of us stumbling through adolescence. An undercurrent of sexual assault runs through the story, her mother, her cousin, her own encounters on the subway, in the hospital where she spends time in therapy. "My mother had borne my loathing for years like someone wrongly accused, quietly serving her unearned sentence knowing that she would someday be free, but not yet" yet she raises a child of her own decades later "who has grown up knowing ordinary love." The writing is good and the characters are well described although I had trouble tracking her friends. I particularly enjoyed her fantasies about the house's prior occupant and her love interests. I wouldn't go through adolescence again for anything. [a:Sarah Manguso|52289|Sarah Manguso|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1631212603p2/52289.jpg] has produced an apt story of the tribulations of growing up. ( )

EN COTIZACIÓN

Beautiful language and insights, but I was distracted by the narrator’s litany of offenses against her, no matter how well written. I also found myself not nearly as interested in the story within the story. ( )

Very cold indeed. Though several flashbacks retrieved very old memories of growing up in the Northeast and the suburbs which was sweet. ( )

A girl grows up an outsider in a Massachusetts WASP town haunted by Cabots and Lowells, with some friends and more memories of girlish fads than family affection and gradually learns that in her family affection had no good models and pervasive poisonous ones. ( )