This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

by Aidan Chambers

Overview

Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write out her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl, who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, faith, and of herself in the world. Her thoughts range widely: on Shakespeare and breasts, periods and piano playing, friendship and trees, consciousness and sleep, and much more besides. As she writes of William Blacklin, the boy she chooses as her first lover, or Julie, the teacher who encourages her spiritual life, Cordelia maddens, fascinates, and ultimately seduces the reader. This is a character never to be forgotten from a writer at the height of his powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683358442
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date:	05/23/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	832
Sales rank:	770,846
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Aidan Chambers won the highest literary honors for his novel Postcards from No Man’s Land: the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal. He was also awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for his life’s work, and is only the second British writer to receive it. He lives in Gloucester, England, with his American wife, Nancy, who is the editor of Signal magazine. For more information, visit his Web site at www.aidanchambers.com.

Editorial Reviews

While waiting for her baby to arrive, 19-year-old Cordelia Kenn constructs a pillow book, a collection of writings on various topics, "a portrait of myself as a teenager." She hopes that when her daughter (she knows it's a girl) turns 16, the two can read the book together, to "find out how similar we are and how different." After a brief introduction, Cordelia begins recounting her experiences from three months before her 16th birthday, when she selects 18-year-old William Blacklin as her first boyfriend for "all-out, all-in-all, all-the-way-sex," prompted by a magazine article stating that "the average age when girls... `lost their virginity' was sixteen years and three months." Chambers (Postcards from No Man's Land) starts with a promising premise: the tender relationship that grows between Will and Cordelia. The ensuing discussions (between Cordelia and Will, and also between Cordelia and her aunt) about first love and the role sex plays in a relationship provides much food for thought. However, this 800-page tome starts to ramble after about 200 pages, and may cause readers to lose interest in Cordelia's ruminations. Her narration chronicles her sexual history not only with Will, but with a 50-year-old man, plus her kidnapping and attempted rape by an acquaintance. Readers may well ask why, out of the myriad experiences a teen may wish to record for posterity with the express idea of sharing it with her child, would the heroine choose to focus almost exclusively on her sexual experiences. Ages 16-up. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 9 Up-Cordelia Kenn is 19 and happily expecting a baby girl. She writes a series of pillow books-Japanese diaries of total disclosure-to her unborn daughter. First, she describes her courtship with Will, her first love. The lengthy second book tells two stories, one on every other page. The remaining books describe her affair with a married man, an intimate friendship with a female teacher, and her reunion with her beloved. Cordelia writes of her life and desires with thrilling abandon and unabashed sexuality, and her first book-with its breathless pace, come-hither conversation, and chase and catch-is a whirling, delicious sex bomb. The form of the second book is jarring and infuriating if read in sequence, yet it's too disheartening, in a book of this size, to read one story and turn back 200 pages for the other. The real challenge for teens, though, is pages and pages of Cordelia's bad poetry and precious, banal, and often crushingly boring musings. Chambers's male characters are perfectly realized, and he hits bright, insecure Will right on the familiar, frustrating male teenage head. Unfortunately, Cordelia reeks of male fantasy, and Chambers's strings are evident as she and a friend write on each other and roll around naked; as she purports to love menstruation; as she expounds upon breasts ad nauseum. By the last third of the novel, even the formerly crisp dialogue often sounds like philosophical discourse. Cordelia's excruciating musings continue to intrude upon her last three books, and the electric promise of the first section is never fulfilled.-Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

With profound respect for readers, Chambers again stretches the YA genre to its edges and beyond. As a future gift to her almost-born daughter, Cordelia records the stormy, passionate story of her life from age 15 to 20 in the form of Japanese "pillow books." She's a great fan of Shakespeare and Dickinson; her own voice is philosophical and meaty, cerebral and emotional. She intellectually chooses schoolmate Will as partner for her "first sex" but falls head-over-heels in love with him, and here lies the story's heart. Chambers makes Cordelia utterly frank about sexual and biological details. Other arcs include Cordelia's enigmatic bond with a teacher (never fully graspable), her musings about the roles of poetry and piano in her life, and Will's passion for trees. Some reflections are written directly after an event, others with years of perspective; it is these years, not always identifiable, that render the piece a YA/adult crossover. Characters are intricate and sometimes infuriating, moments of horror stunning and unforeshadowed. Ambitious, imperfect, challenging and powerfully affecting. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews