The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Random
House: 1/31/2017
eBook review copy; 384 pages
ISBN-13:
9780812989281
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker is very highly
recommended. This is a powerful novel that explores the creative
process and coming to terms with your past. It's about friendship
and secrets. It's about ambition and self-doubt. It's about fame and
dark secrets. It's about gifts and inner demons. Expect language and
self-destructive behavior. It is heartbreaking, funny, scathingly
brilliant and one of the best novels I've read this year. This is a
debut novel and Whitaker just made a fan.
Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses met in a college art class and became
fast friends as well as artistic partners. They both came from a
white trash background, especially to their elitist college
classmates. Sharon's family is in rural Kentucky while Mel's is from
Florida, where her mom is in prison. The two, who seem to be
opposites - Mel is gay and outgoing while Sharon is straight and
reticent - share a love of comics and drawing. They become
animators. Even though they may be motivated by different desires,
together they struggle and drink and smoke and work hard. After a
decade collaborating, their first full length movie, Nashville
Combat, is released and they are the recipients of a
prestigious grant.
Nashville Combat is autobiographical and based on Mel's
childhood. The fame and notoriety that follows their success leads
to self-destructive behavior on Mel's part and self-doubt for
Sharon. Their collaboration and friendship seems to be on the verge
of imploding when a tragedy happens that pulls the two back to an
understanding of what they mean to each other. After secrets Sharon
has been keeping are revealed, they understand how important it is
for them to continue working together. But this is just the start to
their story...
There is so much more to The Animators than this brief
description. That is only the beginning. I would say it is a
coming-of-age novel, but it's more a
coming-to-terms-with-a-crappy-childhood novel. But it is also about
the secrets we keep, secrets from our past, family secrets, and how
long some of us carry the burden of those secrets. It questions
which relationships can survive revelations? How much do you have to
sacrifice for your art?
The writing is exceptional, extraordinary, amazing! All the
characters are well developed, even those briefly introduced. Sharon
and Mel will become real to you. You will know these women and their
inner turmoil. Your fingers will feel sore and you'll swear they are
ink stained. You'll have an urge to smoke. You'll laugh at the
jokes. And your heart will break. The settings are just as finely
drawn and skillfully described. Whether in Brooklyn or Florida or
Kentucky, you will know where you are. Whitaker captures the
ambience; you feel the atmosphere, smell the odors and hear the
defining sounds.
The Animators is an exceptional novel and certainly one of the top books of the year, which is why this review, originally published on 11/26/16, is being reposted.
Disclosure:
My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.
Quotes:
And I see something I have
never seen before in Mel: self-removal. Inside, she has
fled. The ability of anyone who has ever been on the
receiving end of something violent to grasp the details
that remind them of their humiliation - smells,
colors, sounds - and blur these details
so that they become foreign, someone else’s property. It
is a cultivated skill, requiring time, experience,
unspeakable mental real estate. It is, for the
desperate, the only chance to leave what happened with
the part of yourself that is still yours. Children learn
it. Boys, but more often, and more closely, girls. When
girls learn it, they learn it for the rest of their
lives, inventing two separate planes on which they exist - the
life of the surface, presented for others, and the life
forever lived on the inside, the one that owns you. They
will never forget how to make themselves disappear. To
blend into the air.
She turns, giving me her
ultimate nonplussed look. “You may not know this about
yourself,” she says, “but you’ve got a serious gift for
self-containment. You run a pretty tight f*ckin
ship, presentation-wise. Kind of freaks people out.”
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