A heartbreaking tale about a family ripped apart by mental illness and abuse, but one that might have been better condensed.
Sherman’s debut novel explores how abuse takes its toll on children, even long after they become adults.
The five Anderson sisters—Eva, Hedy, Lily, Sophie and Patty—grew up with an abusive mother and alcoholic father in small, rural Hardinsburg, Kentucky. Despite their traumatic youth and its ensuing psychological effects, the sisters have remained “strangely loyal to one another, almost a single unit,” even into adulthood. As the book opens, the sisters convene to begin their biannual tradition of cleaning their mentally ill mother’s yard at the end of the autumn season. The task goes according to plan until Sophie goes inside her mother’s home to find her murdered on the couch, stabbed through the neck. The ensuing police investigation reveals that one of the sisters committed the crime, and soon both the family and the public must deal with the complex reality of what’s occurred. This harrowing look at child abuse graphically describes how the sisters’ mother physically and psychologically tormented them; for example, she left them alone in a playpen all day, withheld food, and even killed the family dog in front of them. The novel explores complex, relevant themes, including the nature of guilt (particularly in cases of revenge), the ways that adults cope with childhood trauma, and in Hedy’s story, the difficulties of being gay in a closed-minded community. Sherman also offers an inventive narrative structure, telling the story from the third-person perspectives of several main characters. Despite its strengths, however, the book is overlong, and often hampered by irrelevant information; for example, the first chapter includes a large amount of medical and advertising jargon that never becomes pertinent later.
A heartbreaking tale about a family ripped apart by mental illness and abuse, but one that might have been better condensed.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990808800
Page Count: 478
Publisher: L'Oeuf Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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