A Girl Could Stand Up
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
When six-year-old Elray reaches up to touch the moon in the Tunnel of Love, she narrowly escapes a freak electric current that claims the lives of both her parents. Suddenly orphaned, she is left stunned and mute, until two loving but undomesticated uncles step in.
Cross-dressing Uncle Ajax insists on being addressed as 'Aunt'; Uncle Harwood is a macho photographer, full of swagger and fond of drink. When the deceptively sweet Irish lawyer Rena moves in to mount a lucrative lawsuit against the fairground, the eccentric household becomes the very model of family life reinvented.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A six-year-old girl loses her parents in an accident and refashions her life under the tutelage of two bachelor uncles in Marshall's quirky, meandering first novel. Elray Mayhew's parents, Barkley and Jack, are electrocuted in an amusement park Tunnel of Love while celebrating Elray's sixth birthday. Her unlikely new caretakers are "Auntie" Ajax, a middle-aged transvestite who dabbles in amateur theater, and Uncle Harwood, a worldly photographer and rou . They don't get along with each other, but for love of Elray they move into the Mayhew's big home in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. At 12, Elray takes to exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the National Cathedral, where she meets a kindred spirit, 13-year-old Raoul Person. The two reenact the battle of Troy and fool around with her movie camera. When incipient sexuality pushes the two soul mates apart, other nutty, surprising characters begin to dominate Elray's youth, such as Rena Guilfoyle, the raw-boned Irish lawyer preparing them all for a big lawsuit against the amusement park, and Granny Harwood herself, the matriarch who was supposed to have died in a freak fire in Blackie's House of Beef 30 years before. Marshall's tale has all the necessary elements of a gently amusing novel, but they never really coalesce, largely because of Marshall's verbose, often bland writing. In spite of its charming premise, this coming-of-ager feels bloated.
