From Publishers Weekly
"I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up." Thus the reader is catapulted directly into the conflicted world of a smalltown English schoolgirl in 20-year-old Ray's relentlessly driven debut novel (she left school at 16 to write it). The narrator (whose name is never given) lives with her constantly bickering hippie vegetarian parents and her younger brother. Her self-pitying, feckless father obsesses over her homework, friends and clothes, and enlists her aid in belittling and disparaging her mother. When she reaches high school, the narrator desperately wants to join the in-crowd. She's in luck when she starts dating Robin, who is part of the popular group. Soon she abandons her former, less cool friends and spends lunch hours "snogging" with Robin. Strangely, Robin's touch does not appeal to the narrator until he hits her and she experiences her first sexual response. Robin loses his masochistic appeal when he says that he loves her, and the narrator moves on to Oliver, a 27-year-old consumer electronics salesman. Oliver's rough treatment proves orgasmic; his escalating violence releases her impulses toward self-mutilation. The narrator's befogged passivity (evidenced by her constant repetition of the phrase "I wondered") and her fascination with the sordidness of the physical side of life (a favorite word is "disgusted") make her mind a somewhat claustrophobic place to be, while her eventual insights into her family dysfunction will seem dated to those who grew up with Catcher in the Rye. However, the novel's structureAshort segments, no chapters and zingy clinchersAmoves this compelling story along swiftly to a surprising conclusion. The narration is leavened with touches of deadpan humor and spot-on observations that add credibility and demonstrate Ray's promise as a writer, despite some evidence of immaturity in her craft. Agent, Patrick Walsh. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This raw debut by precocious British 20-year-old Ray deftly chronicles a girl's painful transition to young adulthood. With the brutally frank opening line, "I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up," it's clear that the narrator lacks both judgment and self-esteem, if not sexual experience. Ray does such an insightful job of showing the descent from embarrassed schoolgirl to confused lover of a much older man that you wonder whether this story is autobiographical--and, if so, how the author lived to tell it with such strength. Particularly poignant are scenes involving a jealous childhood friend, those with the narrator's bitter father, and one about her first experience snorting speed, which leads to terrible self-mutilation with a razor blade. Obscenity-laden and distressing, Pure is not for the easily offended or for those who would rather forget their entire adolescence. It is, however, powerful. Recommended for all libraries.-Christine Perkins, Medford Teen Lib., Jackson Cty. Lib. Syst., OR Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Lori Leibovich
Reading Pure is like receiving dispatches from the front lines of young womanhood.


From Booklist
If you harbor illusions of idyllic childhood spent in blissful ignorance of today's problems, this book will be a disturbing wake-up call. The 14-year-old narrator smokes pot at lunch and lets boys feel her up because she knows they wouldn't hang out with her otherwise. Longing to be friends with the "in crowd," yet too thoughtful to ditch her longtime, best friend, a loser, she straddles different worlds. She discovers the pain-as-pleasure concept, first through a perverse relationship with a man seventeen years her senior, then by taking razor blades to her skin. Her parents, so caught up in their own bickering, never notice the cutting. Her narration reveals that she is wise beyond her years, while her methods of dealing with the horror that is her life are terribly naive and childlike. The writing, by a 16-year-old-girl who took a year off from school to finish it, will amaze, while the story will disturb. This first novel generated both controversy and acclaim upon its initial publication in Britain. Ellie Barta-Moran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
A British debut novel, penned by a (then) 16-year-old author, offers the intense immediacy of teenage youth--though often without the forward momentum and richness of texture of a fully accomplished work.The unnamed narrator is a 14-year-old girl who describes, in detail at times biting and at others long-winded, the travails of teenage life in a coastal English town. A bit awkward when she begins school, she learns how to fit in with the cool kids by letting the boys stick their hands up her skirt during break. Soon she has a clique of friends and a mean-spirited, acne-covered boyfriend named Robin, whom she meets for lunch to smoke pot and roll around on the grass with. Slowly her real psyche is revealed when Robin begins to hit her: she likes it, or, more accurately, craves the extreme sensation to feel alive. So begins the narrator's masochism. When Robin falls in love with her, she pushes away his gentleness and begins dating 31-year-old Oliver. More interesting, though, than her romantic relationships are her familial ones--with her loving if volatile father and silent mother, left-wingers who have slipped into a life of disillusionment and endless arguing. Her parents' fighting, the increasingly violent relationship with Oliver, and her gradual withdrawal from school life set the stage for self-mutilation as she cuts herself repeatedly--another desperate act for some kind of cold comfort. While the speaker provides a bleak, honest assessment of youthful angst, too much, given all that happens, is left unsaid or unexplained: her parents' acceptance of a grown man sleeping with their daughter (in their house); her largely undisclosed relationships with friends; and, most importantly, the lack of self-reflection on the teller's part.Graphic and guileless, as well as underdeveloped, though admittedly intriguing if only because of the author's youth. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
A sensational and accomplished novel that made its young author one of the most talked about in Britain last year, Pure is about fourteen--the age when you know everything, except when you don't know anything. It's about first love and the end of innocence in all its passion and absurdity. It's about the raw transition between loving your parents as a child and understanding them as an adult. It's about the cool friend for whom everything seems effortless, and the impossibly embarrassing friend you're nice to when your cool friends can't see. It's about the struggle between desire and duty, and about a chance meeting with a twenty-seven-year-old man. And it's about what happens after. Pure has the shocking immediacy that made Less Than Zero so indelible. It evokes the brutalities of adolescence with the lucidity of Two Girls, Fat and Thin. It is sure to establish its author as one of the most remarkable and fearless young writers to emerge in recent years.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Pure is about fourteen - the age when you know everything, except when you don't know anything. It's about first love and the end of innocence, and realizing your family perhaps isn't as happy or your parents as together as you thought. It's about the cool friend for whom everything seems effortless, and the impossibly embarrassing friend you're nice to when your cool friends can't see. It's about that twenty-seven-year-old man who flirts with you when he sells your dad your overpriced birthday stereo - except he actually calls. And it's about what happens after.

FROM THE CRITICS

Terri Griffith - BUST Magazine

Pure isn't quite a girl's coming-of-age story; that would make it nicer than it really is. Instead, it is about one girl's struggle to define her sexuality outside the limits set by family and friends. What makes this novel different is how expertly Ray captures being embarrassed by her family, the longing to be part of the popular crowd, and what it's like to be barely fifteen.

KLIATT

At 14, the narrator of this contemporary and unflinchingly realistic bildingsroman has already given up wonder for experience. The crowd with whom she'd like to be associated at school is judgmental and craven, rather than opinionated and sensual. Her former best friend acts the role of Greek chorus in the unfolding tragedy of innocence lost. Her parents bicker in the background while lying boldly when directing their remarks to the narrator and the reader. Nameless and self-abusive, the narrator reaches for identity by experimenting with sex with an insensitive peer and then upping the ante for herself by falling in love with an electronics salesman who is past 30. Ray wrote this story while close to her narrator's ground zero, leaving school to work on it at 16 and seeing it to publication at home in Great Britain two years later. Her control over dialogue, character development and plot building is admirable. What the characters have to say reveals their motivations without explaining them away, and the narrator, her family members and her pedophilic paramour all become startlingly real and fully developed through revelations of their flaws and strengths. There are unexpected twists in the tale that increase its credibility rather than turning it into wish fulfillment. The details and language here are crass and specific, in perfect keeping with the narrator and her story. She and her British schoolgirl chums speak in expletive-littered jibes. Her boyfriends' carnal appetites are expressed in direct action described almost clinically. The cutting she uses to punish herself and the drinking her father uses to soften his own disappointments are explicit without being dramatized. While anovel of youth by a youthful artist, Pure requires a reader with some maturity and distance to be successful. The narrator's peers will be able to identify with one or another of the cast here but without being able to apprehend the drama in its full scope and depth. KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1998, Grove Press, 404p, 21cm, 00-028012, $13.00. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Francisca Goldsmith; Teen Svcs., Berkeley P.L., Berkeley, CA January 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 1)

Library Journal

This raw debut by precocious British 20-year-old Ray deftly chronicles a girl's painful transition to young adulthood. With the brutally frank opening line, "I was about thirteen when I started letting the boys feel me up," it's clear that the narrator lacks both judgment and self-esteem, if not sexual experience. Ray does such an insightful job of showing the descent from embarrassed schoolgirl to confused lover of a much older man that you wonder whether this story is autobiographical--and, if so, how the author lived to tell it with such strength. Particularly poignant are scenes involving a jealous childhood friend, those with the narrator's bitter father, and one about her first experience snorting speed, which leads to terrible self-mutilation with a razor blade. Obscenity-laden and distressing, Pure is not for the easily offended or for those who would rather forget their entire adolescence. It is, however, powerful. Recommended for all libraries.--Christine Perkins, Medford Teen Lib., Jackson Cty. Lib. Syst., OR Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

A British debut novel, penned by a (then) 16-year-old author, offers the intense immediacy of teenage youth—though often without the forward momentum and richness of texture of a fully accomplished work. The unnamed narrator is a 14-year-old girl who describes, in detail at times biting and at others long-winded, the travails of teenage life in a coastal English town. A bit awkward when she begins school, she learns how to fit in with the cool kids by letting the boys stick their hands up her skirt during break. Soon she has a clique of friends and a mean-spirited, acne-covered boyfriend named Robin, whom she meets for lunch to smoke pot and roll around on the grass with. Slowly her real psyche is revealed when Robin begins to hit her: she likes it, or, more accurately, craves the extreme sensation to feel alive. So begins the narrator's masochism. When Robin falls in love with her, she pushes away his gentleness and begins dating 31-year-old Oliver. More interesting, though, than her romantic relationships are her familial ones—with her loving if volatile father and silent mother, left-wingers who have slipped into a life of disillusionment and endless arguing. Her parents' fighting, the increasingly violent relationship with Oliver, and her gradual withdrawal from school life set the stage for self-mutilation as she cuts herself repeatedly—another desperate act for some kind of cold comfort. While the speaker provides a bleak, honest assessment of youthful angst, too much, given all that happens, is left unsaid or unexplained: her parents' acceptance of a grown man sleeping with their daughter (in their house); her largely undisclosed relationshipswithfriends; and, most importantly, the lack of self-reflection on the teller's part. Graphic and guileless, as well as underdeveloped, though admittedly intriguing if only because of the author's youth.