The National Post loves 'bitingly funny' Lemon
As coming-of-age novels go, Cordelia Strube’s vivid portrayal of a teenage girl searching for her true mother places the genre firmly in the peculiar times in which we live. In their initiation into the world of adults, the literary adolescents created in what we like to think of as simpler times — the Holden Caulfields, Scout Finches and Huck Finns — moved from innocence to experience and from youthful idealism to budding pragmatism. The denouement became the tenuous reconciliation of disillusionment with hope, a fine balance that is necessary to sustain us all.
But Strube’s 16-year-old protagonist, the unforgettable Lemon, takes this archetypal journey in reverse. 'When I was eight,' she says, 'I stopped reacting to humans. Reacting gives them power which they can use against you.' If Lemon is to survive her tumultuous teen years, her jaded spirit must discover an innocence she has never known. And her cynicism must make room for wonder. Like so many young people born into an age when everything you’ve ever wanted to know about everything is little more than a mouse click away, Lemon has a lot more to unlearn about life than she has to learn ...
... Such anomie in someone so young is bitingly funny. At first. Then, Strube’s wicked satire turns into tragedy when Lemon’s bleak outlook is corroborated in spades ... In introducing readers to the indomitable Lemon, Strube has taken us on a remarkable trip — part literary kaleidoscope, part emotional roller coaster — into the life and mind of a young girl searching for a love she can’t quite bring herself to believe in.
