Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human...
A disturbing, often compelling first novel about a feisty young woman who’s had more than her share of abuse, cruelty, and loss but fights her way back to sanity.
Narrator Clarisse Broder, 31, is married to a rich, boring Wall Street guy with a fetish for dogs (his alarm clock doesn’t buzz, it barks). They met in a hospital, where Clarisse was supposedly recovering from an emergency appendectomy, and married a week later. As a result, there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and, despite Clarisse’s clever banter and wry sense of humor, it’s obvious that she’s haunted by sinister memories. The truth is that Beth, as she was once known, ran away from home at 16 and was taken in by a sadistic pimp named Ben, who tortured her physically and psychologically until she became a willing member of the stable of boys and girls he directed in S/M performances for the benefit of wealthy clients. The renamed Clarisse finds that a dull suburban existence isn’t enough to make her feel safe or happy, and there’s a nagging secret lurking just below her conscious recall. When the book of stories her husband encourages her to write develops a cult following, she worries that her past will be exposed. Desperate for relief, she decides to kill herself, but instead begins thinking about “a different type of suicide, the kind where you end up free, in a new life that you yourself decide.” To this end, she calls on Ben for help—a mistake that eventually prompts her to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to escape him. This proves to be the first step in a harrowing flight across the country, until Beth/Clarisse winds up in the arms of a woman whose love enables her to recover her memory and her life.
Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human need: a graphically violent but impressive debut.Pub Date: July 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87035-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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