Ive tried to this day to read through this book,but never managed to get through it.

It was just too confusing... ( )

I really enjoyed this book at the beginning. It is the story of Saskia, a 12-year-old girl who lives on a former commune outside Ithaca, NY. Though she chafes at the limited life of the farm and taking care of a "crew" of younger siblings, she leads a rich inner life with "imaginary friends" like Horatio Hornblower (The Captain), Tycho Brahe, and even the wily Odysseus himself. Then she meets Jane Singh. This lithe beauty brings a whiff of the outer world to the tiny town of Tyler. Jane and Saskia become the best of friends, influencing each other in the way teenage girls do.

But then Saskia is invited to go on a quest with her father, whom she barely remembers. Jane comes too, and things devolve from there. The novel which began in such a beautiful, innocent, whimsical way comes crashing down into reality.

I am not against realist novels, but this one started in such a romantic, fantastical way, I found the switch jarring and unpleasant. ( )

The style of this story is fascinating, with Saskia's Homerian daydreams influencing her experiences. She is growing up in the aftermath of a commune that had been dominated by a guru. She has a girl-crush on the new girl at school and they embark upon an intense friendship, but then the return of her father distracts her and twists events around. Her quest for the truth brings the story to many uncomfortable places. I almost gave the book up in disgust, but it was saved by the ending. ( )

This is a novel that's all about story, which is as you might expect for a tale that bears so many subtle homages (most of which I through ignorance missed) to The Iliad. In the early chapters of the novel our 12-year-old heroine, Saskia -- growing up in what remains of a Long Island commune, presided over by her self-absorbed New Ager mother Lauren -- is so completely absorbed in her favourite books that her experience of life is at least half the time fantasticated almost beyond recognition. Hall manages to convey this through a narrative that could at any moment have flown off the rails into incomprehensibility but somehow remains not just clear but vivid; it's an extraordinarily impressive trick, and I am very jealous.

(This is not a book that I can imagine loses a shred of its impact if you know the bones of the plot in advance, so I'm happily going to divulge them. If you're one of those people who refuse to read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" because you already know how it turns out, skip ahead, please, to my notes on book #84.)

The intensity of the prose drops off after this as we get into the tale's main plot. Saskia, whose intelligence and oddballery make her always the outcast at school, befriends newcomer Jane Singh, an Anglo-Indian who's a year older but in Saskia's class. The two revel in each other's fantasy worlds. One day a card arrives from Saskia's father, Thomas, who abandoned the commune when Saskia was a toddler, inviting her and Lauren on a trip to Scandinavia to take part in a Greenpeace-like project protecting a threatened river. Lauren declines to go, so everyone agrees that Jane can go in her place.

The main part of the book takes place on that Scandinavian excursion, while it becomes ever clearer to us that Thomas is a fount of deception; the increasingly improbable, always self-aggrandizing tales he tells about himself and his exploits are in their way as fantasticated as Saskia's mental adventures in the worlds of Captain Hornblower, Tycho Brahe, Odysseus and the rest, but are very significantly more dangerous -- especially to the two impressionable adolescents, who take what he says at face value. Saskia of course sees nothing of this: he is the wondrous father who was for so long lost to her, now returned to her life. His frequent spoilt-brat behaviour seems to her to be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the actions of the fools and scoundrels who surround him. Because Thomas and Jane are the most precious people in Saskia's life, she essentially throws the two of them at each other . . . and we discover that paedophilia is another of Thomas's enchanting traits.

The affair between Thomas and Jane continues even after Thomas "reluctantly" comes back to live on the commune, and even after he has regained Lauren's bed. At one stage he comes within a whisker of bedding Saskia herself, but what must be his solitary surviving scruple dissuades him at the last moment. And slowly, as Thomas's fits of temper become ever more frequent and ever more infantile, Saskia begins to realize that this supposed angel is truly a monster.

In the final major section of the book she escapes the commune to New York, where (and again this is a neat trick for Hall to pull off), in order to survive, she somehow manages to exploit her sexuality and the gullibility of young males without ever quite losing that feisty, imaginative, intelligent spark that makes her such an appealing character -- without losing her integrity, if you will. Eventually home calls her, and she returns to the commune, where, while still in essence the same Saskia as she was before she left for the Scandinavian trip, she very swiftly re-evaluates the people there, discovering that her mother's boyfriend Bill (back on the scene after Thomas's latest departure) is far from the oaf she thought he was; that her younger quasi-siblings are people in their own right, with character-strengths of their own, rather than just the "crew" to be bossed around; and so forth.

A fair number of comments I've seen about The Saskiad describe it as a coming-of-age tale, but my own feeling is that this is an inaccurate description -- or at least a misleading one. Saskia's adventures haven't filled her with a new confidence-of-self or made her into a somber, grounded young adult: her tale has, rather, been a sort of voyage back to the beginning. Of course she's older and more knowledgeable, and better able to understand the world, but in the most important sense -- the shipmate-of-Hornblower-on-moment-and-assistant-to-Tycho-the-next sense, she hasn't changed at all. It's as if she's discovered that she doesn't need to come of age.

All in all, a very disturbing book -- at least for this reader -- but one that I value having read and will, I'm sure, remember for a long while.

Incidentally, the PW review of The Saskiad, as cited on the book's Amazon page, must be one of the least accurate even PW has ever published. It's as if the reviewer read a brief outline of the book and then winged it from there, filling in the details with suppositions based on what the plots of template coming-of-age novels are supposed to be. One of the great strengths of this novel is that it breaks quite a lot of the rules, so the reviewer's description ends up looking pretty goddam silly. ( )

The Saskiad is an extraordinary tale of fantasy and reality melded by a young girl’s awakening into adulthood. Saskia is a lonely outcast at her school. She lives on a commune and uses any free time that is not spent rearing the wild bunch of children that live there with her, idolising and reading about epic adventurers. In fact, after I’ve read Homer and Melville I will have to reread the novel just so that I can understand the countless references made to such classic writers and their genius works. I won’t deny that I felt very poorly-read as compared to this girl of fourteen who had such illustrious novels under her belt. At any rate, Saskia’s reality gets turned upside down as she befriends the new girl, Jane, and suddenly experiences every young girl’s dream... to have a best friend.

The book is a delicious exploration of their obsessive friendship, and how they relate with others around their unwavering love. They laugh, cry and grow together, and it is with this growth that eventually their relationship takes new forms, and veers off in countless directions. I often had to remind myself that the novel was written by a male, as Brian Hall’s depictions of teenage girls and the intricacies of their relationships was often eerily accurate and familiar. I’m left wondering if he had any help with character development through either his wife or a sister or something.

The Saskiad is also a story about the relationships (or a lack there of) between children and their parents. Thomas, Saskia’s father is deplorable, as are his inappropriate relationships with the ladies in his life, and you may have to restrain yourself from throwing the book at the wall when faced with some of his antics throughout.

I have heard some other readers complain that the last quarter of the novel is not as beautifully written as the first three parts, that there is a shift, in that Saskia’s fantasies are no longer intertwined in her realities. For me this merely showcases that she has matured into adulthood, lost her innocence and sees the world through newly jaded eyes; often a sad but true consequence of growing up.

This glorious story seems to go on forever, until it finally ends and you are left wondering what to do with yourself now that the eccentric and lovable Saskia is no longer there to watch over. Sadly, I was tortured with melancholy over the last lines of this great book.