Penelope
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- 15,00 kr
Publisher Description
Meet Penelope O'Shaughnessy, Harvard freshman.
Armed with her Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights poster and party conversation modelled on the repartee of Noel Coward, Penelope is ready to take her place on campus. But where are the kindred spirits who will share her passion for Morse code and Tetris? Penelope's roommates, over-achieving Emma and the sullen Lan, seem to have already got to grips with university life, and she is finding it hard to work out if the dashing but elusive Gustav matches up to her hero, Hercule Poirot.
Penelope follows our heroine's progress through her first year among America's elite, as she navigates the mysteries of life, love, inappropriate tutors, marionette operation and how to kiss on both cheeks and avoid disaster.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrington's debut is a wryly funny bildungsroman chronicling the titular character's freshman year at Harvard, and all the supplementary standard collegiate fare drunken parties and regrettable hookups, pretentious extracurriculars, friends with and without benefits, an incessant pressure to succeed, and the #1 question: Who am I? Relatively plotless, the novel still works in a meandering, searching way. Penelope is sweet but socially awkward, and woefully prone to let little things spiral out of control during a drunken dance, a boy kisses Penelope, "mostly with his incisors," before vomiting on her shoes; and a favor for a roommate leads to a long-term commitment to a stage production of Caligula. While navigating the perilous social tides of the sea of her privileged peers, Penelope's heart floats between Ted, whose romantic involvement with Penelope's friend Catherine is ill-defined, and eccentric Gustav, who uses words like "darling" and "bourgeois," and prides himself on being "as primed for disease as an Indian." Penelope's candidly deadpan neuroses provide plenty of humor, and while the well-off kids of Harvard Yard might seem too aloof, in Harrington's hands they're entertaining company.
