“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”
"I did not kill my father," this slim novel begins, "but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way." Soon the mother is dead as well, and four children are left to fend for themselves in a secluded house in a dying part of the city.
There’s Julie, the eldest, a ripe & willful beauty who’s almost a woman; there’s Jack, the narrator, a boy bewildered by his growing body & appetites; there’s Sue, bookish & ever-observant; and then there’s Tom, the baby of the family, who actually seems to get younger, regressing as the days go by. These four form an uneasy family, slowly learning to be self-sufficient in this strangely apocalyptic setting.
But an intruder in the form of Julie’s new boyfriend threatens their fragile stasis by asking too many questions. How long have the four of them been alone? And just what is buried under the crumbling pile of cement in the basement?
I read The Cement Garden when I was 14 and did a summer job in a small bookstore where I hardly had anything to do than reading books. It was an intense experience back then and you should give it a try if you’re into this kind of dark “social study” novels. There is also a film, in case you’re too lazy to read ;p And, yes, it has a lot to perv over… including girls looking like cute boys, cute boys dressing as girls, male and female nudity, masturbation scenes and Incest.
I swear, I was interested in seeing Eden of the East before I was aware of its obviously exhibitionistic elements ;p
