Wetlands
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Price:
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$22.99
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On Sale:
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23/02/2009
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Formats:
Trade PB
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An international sensation—with more
than 1 million copies sold in Germany, and rights snapped up in 26 countries—Wetlands
is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the
conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world.
Helen Memel is an outspoken,
contradictory eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a
precocious sexual confidence. She begins her story from a hospital bed, where
she’s slowly recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents’ divorce. To
distract and console herself, Helen ruminates on her past sexual and physical
adventures in increasingly uncomfortable detail; what ensues is “a headlong dash
through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its
narrator’s body and mind.” (The New York Times)
Fantastically sexual, Helen is
constantly blurring the line between celebration, provocation, and dysfunction
in her relationship with her body. Punky alienated teenager, young woman
reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn’t smell,
excrete, desire), bratty smartass, vulnerable, lonely daughter, shock merchant
and pleasure-seeker—Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent
attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and
young she truly is.
In the tradition of The Sexual
Life of Catherine M and Melissa P.’s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed,
Charlotte Roche exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a
compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the
repercussions of family trauma.
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Author Extras
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Critical Praise for
Wetlands
"[Wetlands] is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct,
physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. . . . A cri de
coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise
sanitized women’s world.”
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Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times
"An explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished
literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the
Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard’s Crash and the feminist agenda
of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.”
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Granta Magazine
"[An] explicit and provocative debut novel about an 18-year-old girl with a
very active sex life....Through [protagonist] Helen Memel's mix of eroticism and
profanity, Roche attacks conventional views on hygiene, sexuality and the
definition of femininity."
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Publishers Weekly
"Wetlands is at times difficult to read, but that is all the more
reason to read it. Female readers will be compelled to analyze their reaction to
the gross-outs of this novel, and what it says about their own ideas about
femininity, but I almost hope the readers are more often male. Women: Give this
book to a man who needs to read it!"
—
Jessica Cutler, author of The Washingtonienne
"Wetlands made me squirm-in-my-seat uncomfortable - and I loved every
minute of it! Roche turns expectations about women and sexuality on their head,
and does it with a frankness that's brave and hilarious. In a world where
women's bodies are supposed to be nipped, tucked, shaved and douched,
Wetlands is a much needed antidote."
—
Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth and Full Frontal Feminism
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Wetlands
Wetlands is narrated by eighteen-year-old Helen Memel, an outspoken, contradictory teenager whose childlike stubbornness is paired with a premature sense of sexual confidence. She speaks from a hospital bed in the Department of Internal Medicine, where she’s recovering from an operation after...
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Wetlands
Reader Discretion Advised An international sensation -- with more than 1 million copies sold in Germany, and rights snapped up in 26 countries -- Wetlands is the sexually and anatomically explicit novel that is changing the conversation about female identity and sexuality around the world. Helen...
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