Tita (24 page)
Authors: Marie Houzelle
When we were around twenty-eight, some of my friends started agonizing: “Soon I’ll be thirty, and I haven’t done anything yet, anything worth mentioning. Isn’t it pathetic?”
We were hardly thirty-seven when forty began to loom. They looked at their careers. Even the most successful ones were not where they’d planned to be. And after they turned forty, what could they expect?
Meanwhile, lacking ambition, imagination, and probably a lot more, I was just trying to patch together a living, bring up children, cope with husbands, scribble in public transport, sing in the evening.
Fifty, and so on. Time to breathe in, look around, find out what it is we actually enjoy doing, and do it.
Now.
American paperback edition first published
by Summertime Publications Inc (USA) in 2014
copyright © Marie Houzelle 2014
Summertime Publications
cover design by Joëlle Jolivet
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Houzelle, Marie
Tita / Marie Houzelle 1st edition
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944782
Summertime Publications Inc.
7502 E. Berridge Lane, Scottsdale, AZ 85250
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 9781940333014
Like opening the door to a secret garden,
TITA
transports the reader straight into life in a small town in the south of France during the 1950s, as seen through the eyes of a precocious seven-year-old heroine not soon to be forgotten. Houzelle's prose is unfailingly deft and refreshing. This book is a delight!
-
Anne Korkeakivi, author of
An Unexpected Guest
Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In
Tita
she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages. Like Louise Fitzhugh's classic
Harriet the Spy
, the story is powered by a precocious and independent loner whose observations and reports are both charming and moving.
Tita
is a remarkable debut.
.
-
Katharine Weber, author of
Triangle
and
True Confections
The best book I read this year. Witty, wry, and clever, Tita’s young voice captivated me from the first page. Tita poignantly portrays small-town life as well as the end of the Catholic church’s grip on France, revealing cracks in society that a decade later become the riots of 1968. A rare novel written in English that gives a real taste of French culture. I cannot recommend it enough!
-
Janet Skeslien Charles, author of
Moonlight in Odessa
This book has a charm so unique and powerful, it pulls you in simply, effortlessly, like following a tree lined path on a summery day. The language is utterly original and quietly moving and very very funny and it makes you want to follow Tita onward past the last pages and into the years beyond. I loved it.
.
-
Nicola Keegan, author of
Swimming
Marie Houzelle opens a charmed magic casement on a French childhood.
-
Sheila Kohler,
author of
Dreaming for Freud
Seven-year-old Tita can tell you the correct rule for whether to put an “e” on tout in every grammatical situation, but she does not recognize the tensions and estrangements that haunt her parents’ marriage…She’s got just enough self-understanding to recognize that her teacher objects to her insolence, but not enough worldliness to realize that the last place for a questioner of authority is a nunnery.
We’re laughing, but we’re also intrigued by this child whose understanding can be razor sharp or dense as a thicket. Where will this odd combination take her?
… There’s nothing simplistic about this novel.
Tita
is not an exercise in blind nostalgia for a lost past. It is a rich and warm, yet open-eyed portrait of a place and time just beyond our current reach. It’s a book worth savoring.
–
Judith Starkston
–
New York Journal of Books
In Houzelle's first novel, Tita is a seven-year-old girl growing up in the south of France in the 1950s whose life seems to be defined by obstacles: the many foods that disgust her, the school that fails to challenge her, and parents who struggle to understand her. Tita is precocious and clever, but in some ways painfully inept. She is thoughtful but frail—obsessed with rules and rituals, and determined to understand the nuances. Through Houzelle's sharp, straightforward prose (which captures Tita's perspective), the story of how Tita grows takes center stage. She learns the alternatives to those things that have held her back or held her down. She challenges social strictures that she feels are meaningless. She battles her mother to get what she wants, and when sometimes that turns out to be the wrong decision, she acknowledges it. At the novel's end, Tita is still a little girl, but her brilliance, potential, and unusual way of looking at the world will have won readers over
.
–
Publishers Weekly
Like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Tita, a precocious seven-year-old, finds refuge in books from an often baffling world. Guided by Marie Houzelle’s sharp eye and confident hand, we experience humour, astonishment and delight as we discover life in 1950s provincial France from the viewpoint of a singular child. A triumph of a first novel.
–
Yuriko Tamaki, columnist, the
Yomiuri Shimbun
.
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TITA
by Marie Houzelle: Paperback: 312 pages, Publisher: Summertime Publications Inc (English), ISBN-13: 978-1940333014,
PUBDATE EBOOK: December 1, 2014
For more information, author interviews, lectures and events, please contact Lea Handell, email: [email protected]
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BEST PARIS STORIES
,
anthology of winners of the International Paris Short Story Contest
,
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