Mouthing the Words

by Gibb, Camilla

• ISBN13: 9780786708529
• ISBN10: 0786708522
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-15
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub

Summary

By turns harrowing and hilarious, this adroitly narrated winner of the Toronto Book Award re-creates the world in the imagination of Thelma. It's a world in which she can escape some of her more painful childhood realities, like those games her father likes to make her play, where he's the boss and she the naughty secretary. And her mother so fiercely favors her younger brother, the cherubic Willy, that Thelma finds herself perpetually in emotional exile. No wonder Thelma asks practically every adult she meets to adopt her. Along Thelma's bumpy way from a rural English village to Canada to a law degree at Oxford, she meets many potential parents and even makes some friends, but it is with the companions of her fertile imaginationwith the scaredy-baby Janawee, moody and timid Ginniger, and big, strong, stoic Herointhat Thelma finds comfort. With them, too, she loses an already tenuous connection to reality, though ultimately Thelma's spirit and humor prove to be as indomitable as her wit. "Moving and comic at once.... Hallucinatory, hilarious, and haunting."Boston Globe "Prickly, unsentimental...a portrait of terrible comic humanity."New York Times Book Review "Mesmerizing.... Lush, visceral prose ... rings with an authority rarely found in first novels."Washington Post Book World "A novel of astonishing power .... An instantaneous classic."Baltimore Sun "Elegant ... sings with an almost Victorian delicacy and sophistication."San Francisco Chronicle

Table of Contents

BOOK 1
In an English Garden	3	(22)
Animal Kingdom	25	(14)
Girl with a Suitcase	39	(11)
Fork on the Left	50	(2)
I &harts;	52	(12)
Corinna's Armpit	64	(15)
A Stone Splits	79	(4)
Dog Days and Ice	83	(8)
Burning	91	(6)
The Colour Purple	97	(21)
Thelma of Distinction	118	(7)
Jesus Blinks	125	(16)
Aubrietia	141	(10)
Limited Options in the Late Twentieth Century	151	(4)
BOOK 2
Out-of-body Privileges	155	(7)
But the Greatest of These is Love	162	(3)
Dreamy Spacecake	165	(8)
Cave Dwellers	173	(1)
`An Item'	174	(11)
Who Needs a U-Haul?	185	(4)
Thelma Takes up Room	189	(14)
Fish Girls	203	(11)
Not Designed for Comfort	214	(20)
Golem Reversing	234