Infandous
Age 13+
General Fiction
A dark and twisted tale of lust, love, and lies.
Sephora Golding lives in the shadow of her unbelievably beautiful mother. They scrape by in the seedier part of Venice Beach, but until recently, Sephora has always felt lucky. Until she meets Felix. Venice Beach is a place where people come and go. As one of the few true locals, Sephora is used to attention from visitors, but Felix is unique, and the aftermath of their brief encounter leave Sephora questioning everything.
Creators
Elana K. Arnold completed her M.A. in Creative Writing/Fiction at the University of California, Davis. She grew up in Southern California, where she was lucky enough to have her own horse – a gorgeous mare named Rainbow – and a family who let her read as many books as she wanted. She lives in Huntington Beach, California, with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of animals.
Reviews
Sephora Golding is the daughter of a beauty, and this mother-daughter relationship has informed most of her life. Throughout Sephora’s childhood in Venice Beach, it’s been just the two of them, and as she struggles now with the growing pains of new adulthood, a steadily shrinking future, and with a strange dark sexual secret, it is to that relationship that she continues to turn. It’s the secret, though, that influences her artwork, an ongoing project she calls Infandous: something so horrible it cannot be expressed aloud. Inspired by various fairy tales, Sephora crafts circles around what is hidden, always shying away from acknowledging the thing itself. Clocking in at just 200 pages, this is a story that packs no less of a punch for its brevity. Sephora’s grim reimaginings of fairy tales are the anti-Disney in the extreme (making this best suited for more mature readers). The strands are worked so surely into the narrative that they feel powerful instead of tired. Sephora herself is a narrator who defies convention, and her story, harsh and spare, is unforgettable.
Booklist
The summer before senior year gives Sephora Golding time to surf, work on her found-object works of art and reflect on the turn her life has taken. Seph shares a low-rent apartment in Venice Beach, California, with her stunningly gorgeous mother, Rebecca, who Seph used to imagine was a mermaid. Left by Seph’s father and shunned by Rebecca’s family, the two have always been unusually close. Last year, Seph had a brief fling with an older man; now Rebecca’s having a summertime romance with a younger one. Seph relates her summer tale of self-discovery in a matter-of-fact, occasionally foulmouthed teen voice. She intersperses her account with hard-hitting yet sumptuous versions of fairy tales and myths, from ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ to ‘Demeter and Persephone.’ From her vantage as narrator and storyteller, she points out that ‘[t]hings don’t really turn out the way they do in fairy tales. I’m telling you that right up front, so you’re not disappointed later.’ She calls one of her sculptures Infandous, meaning ‘something that’s too terrible to be spoken aloud.” Hers is a world of raw physicality, underscoring the contrasts between beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, light and shadows that play out as secrets unfold. A coming-of-age story consciously reminiscent of Lolita, this multifaceted portrayal of family bonds surprises with its nuanced and sometimes-searing emotional gravity.
Kirkus Reviews
