The Crocodile Bird

From Publishers Weekly Like a modern-day Scheherazade, young Liza Beck tells her story over a span of nights and in the process finds salvation. After the police question her mother, Eve, about the death of Jonathan Tobias, the owner of Shrove House, 16-year-old Liza runs away with Sean, the young garden hand at the remote English manor. It is to him, over the course of 101 nights, that Liza gradually reveals her strange upbringing, living alone with Eve in the gatehouse of the Tobias estate. Rigorously schooled by her mother, isolated from all society except, on occasion, the mailman or groundskeeper and the few men, including Tobias, whom Eve admits into their world, Liza learns early that others may have something to fear from Eve, but that she does not. Credibility never flags as Edgar Award-winning Rendell ( Kissing the Gunner's Daughter ) reveals the specifics of Liza's increasing contact with the world, creating suspense in the gradually meted out details of Eve's intense attachment to Shrove House and her determination to protect Liza from civilization. Although unpredictable, the payoff seems a little weak and the careful pace somewhat slow; nevertheless, there are no holes in this psychological puzzler that has a strong afterlife. Author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA-Beautiful Eve lives in isolation as caretaker of a remote, (mostly) vacant British estate, where she raises and educates her illegitimate daughter, Liza, away from any modern influences. She becomes involved with men from time to time, but if her privacy is threatened in any way, she murders them. When the police finally catch on and come to arrest Eve, Liza flees. She goes straight to the arms of an admiring young groundskeeper, who gladly welcomes her into his modest home (a van) and into his heart. Now that Liza has tasted freedom, though, she is reluctant to tie herself down, and she rejects her lover's eventual proposal of marriage. She takes the money that Sean offers her along with the van, and sets off on her own. Teens will be intrigued by this dark, multilayered story. Is Liza someone to be pitied, having been raised in total isolation by a half-mad mother, or is she the feminist ideal-intelligent, independent, and resourceful? The Crocodile Bird provides much food for thought for mature teens who have a taste for the unexpected. Susan R. Farber, Chappaqua Public Library, NY Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A sheltered girl spins a tale of her involvement with her mother in a years-old series of killings--in this meditative Arabian Nights of murder-in-retrospect reminiscent of Rendell's Barbara Vine byline. Rendell's Scheherazade is Liza Beck, whose aptly named mother Eve, obsessively attached to Shrove House, the splendid, isolated estate in whose gatehouse she lives, has kept her from all contact with the outside world--no school, no TV--until nearly the time that Eve, about to be taken away by the police, sends her 16-year-old daughter away to the protection of an old London school friend. But Liza runs off instead to her lover Sean Holford, the new Shrove handyman, and spends a hundred nights telling him the story of how Eve came to commit murder--though the story begins ``when I was four...that's when she killed the first one.'' Gradually, like a distant shore in the mist, a byzantine logic comes into view. When her own mother, who's spent years caring for old Jonathan Tobias, the master of Shrove House, is led by his capricious promise to believe he'll leave it to her and then thwarted is by another caprice, Eve stays on as caretaker at young Jonathan's request, determined to entice him into marriage. Years pass, marked only by Jonathan's repeated withdrawal--and by Eve's disembodied homicidal reprisals against anyone who threatens her tenure at Shrove. Eve is finally less fascinating than she's supposed to be, but her daughter, who in her cleareyed innocence says proudly that ``there can't be many people who've read the whole of Virgil's Aeneid in the original and seen two people murdered by the time they're sixteen,'' is a masterly creation, touched equally with pathology and mercy. Trust Rendell to find new depths of terror in the idea of unschooled unsentimentality. And if this sedate, chilling family portrait isn't in the same class as A Judgment in Stone or Make Death Love Me, well, what is? -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more