NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
This is a novel about performance—dialogue, inner dialogue, and imagined dialogue—making it perfect for audio. Narrator Nicole Arumugum’s lovely voice is both languid and lively. The plot weaves between two simultaneous stories and jumps back in forth in time—which is difficult to follow on audio. But somehow this complication suits a book that is full of ambiguity, interchangeable characters, and the questionable use of authority. At the center of the novel is a saxophone teacher who grills her students on a school sex scandal, learns their secrets, and engineers relationships between the girls. Arumugum captures the manipulations of the teacher as well as the insecure tones of the teenagers and the college students next door. Eleanor Catton may want us to think about adolescence as a rehearsal for adulthood, but Arumugum’s performance is the real thing. A.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
New Zealand Listener
"The Rehearsal is a significant debut novel from an exciting young writer. Eleanor Catton is a new talent who has arrived fully formed, with an accomplished, confident and mature voice. This is a startling novel, striking and strange and brave."
Time Out of London
"Startlingly original."
The Times of London
"Uncommonly witty and bold....[The Rehearsal has] a real knack for narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades."
Guardian
"Dazzling....This astonishing debut novel is a cause for surprise and celebration: smart, playful and self-possessed, it has the glitter and mystery of the true literary original....wherever the book falls open it's near-impossible to put down."
Kate Atkinson
"A wonderful debut by a truly exciting new writer—The Rehearsal is compulsively good and while at the same time being immensely readable it also continually calls into question the relationship between so-called 'reality' and fiction, and the very nature of truth itself."
Joshua Ferris
PRAISE FOR THE REHEARSAL:
"This is a mesmerizing, labyrinthine, intricately patterned and astonishingly original novel. It's really something else entirely. I suppose if you need a point of reference, you might say it's as if Miss Jean Brodie got lost in Barth's funhouse. But really it has no comparison. With The Rehearsal you get the style, the sophistication, the boundless possibility and the narrative pleasures that make up any good novel, but you get a bonus, too: a glimpse into the future of the novel itself."
Michael Cart - Booklist (starred)
"The Rehearsal is a tour de force that tells two stories simultaneously while delighting in doubles, parallels, and couples . . . the combination of beautiful writing and inventive, nontraditional structure still make it a dazzling debut."
Stephenie Harrison - Bookpage
"Eleanor Catton's seductive debut is a vibrant novel that tests its readers, both in terms of context and form. . . . Daring and lush. . . a most beguiling read."
Scott Heller - New York Times
"Imagine Sue Sylvester's lines from 'Glee' delivered by Judi Dench and you'll begin to capture the tone taken by the teachers in this mordant debut novel."
Adam Ross - New York Times Book Review
"A wildly brilliant and precocious first novel . . . this young writer is astonishingly talented, and her writing can steal any scene."
Emily Perkins
This is a daring book, full of velvety pleasures but never afraid to show its claws. Eleanor Catton is crazily talented and insightful—and best of all, she makes language seem new.
— author of Not Her Real Name and Other Stories
NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
This is a novel about performance—dialogue, inner dialogue, and imagined dialogue—making it perfect for audio. Narrator Nicole Arumugum’s lovely voice is both languid and lively. The plot weaves between two simultaneous stories and jumps back in forth in time—which is difficult to follow on audio. But somehow this complication suits a book that is full of ambiguity, interchangeable characters, and the questionable use of authority. At the center of the novel is a saxophone teacher who grills her students on a school sex scandal, learns their secrets, and engineers relationships between the girls. Arumugum captures the manipulations of the teacher as well as the insecure tones of the teenagers and the college students next door. Eleanor Catton may want us to think about adolescence as a rehearsal for adulthood, but Arumugum’s performance is the real thing. A.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
