The Tracey Fragments
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Naked under a tattered shower curtain, fifteen-year old Tracey Berkowitz has been sitting in the back of a bus for two days, looking for her brother, Sonny, who thinks he is a dog. Tracey's stories begin to twist and intertwine truth with lies, absorbing the reader into the games and delusions she uses to escape her despair.
The Tracey Fragments is a raw, moving account that immerses the reader into the labyrinth of a troubled, adolescent psyche, full of twists and turns, fear and uncertainty, trust and betrayal.
Maureen Medved adapted her novel into a film screenplay that was directed by acclaimed filmmaker Bruce McDonald. At the Berlin Film Festival in early 2007, the motion picture won the Manfred Salzgeber Prize for an innovative film that broadens the boundaries of cinema.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Another oddly timely book (see above) that comes on the heels of recent headlines of teen violence, Canadian author Medved's debut novel provides an eerie glimpse of a raging adolescent psyche. Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz has been riding on a bus through a blizzard for two days, searching for her younger brother and wearing only a shower curtain. From the back seat she tells her story in a layered narration that shifts from first- to third-person, when Tracey talks about herself as "It," a girl tormented by her classmates and neglected by her parents: "When It went anywhere, It went alone. When It crept against school walls, people held their breath.... Boys pulled at It. Blew their snot on It. Yelled, `It's coming." Tracey's life at her "scary monster house" is no better, her parents alternately catatonically miserable and ruthlessly cruel; they warn Tracy that she'll wind up like her mentally unstable grandmother, who apparently walked the streets in search of abusive men. In her utter isolation Tracey often escapes into a fantasy world where a gorgeous boy, Billy Speed, loves her. The flip side of her psychic dislocation is that she vividly dreams of killing her family, strangers and herself. In fragmented prose mirroring Tracey's splintered identity, Medved gradually reveals her protagonist's devastating reality (that Billy Speed raped her) as well as her sources of hope, her 10-year-old vanished brother, Sonny, who thinks he's a dog, and the distorted memory of her grandmother. Medved skillfully blends Tracey's frenzied facts and fictions into a cohesive portrait of a teenager on the verge of imploding. Tracey's frantic speech, repetitive yet evasive, sometimes appears in capital letters; other times she manages a dry, deadpan voice, like when she's talking about her psychiatrist. Rivulets of hope somehow seep through this taut, harrowing narrative as Tracey examines the steps she's taken, like her grandmother, to search for a world beyond the "monster house."
