An engaging though disturbing view of rape and child abuse from a seldom-seen perspective.
The memoir of a woman who married the man who sexually molested her from the age of 13, and her subsequent psychological struggles to be freed from his abuse.
Daleen Berry thought she was having a fairly happy childhood, except for her father’s occasional drunken outbursts of verbal and physical abuse against her mother. So when Berry’s neighbor, Eddie—a young man her family likes and the older brother of one of her friends—pushes her into actions she knows are wrong, she tries to stay a “good girl” by convincing herself they’re in love, resolving to marry him one day. When Berry becomes pregnant at 16, they finally do get married; so begins more than a decade of verbal abuse, marital rapes and Eddie’s complete disregard for Berry’s control of her own body. He forces her to have four children before she’s 22. As Eddie’s behavior deteriorates and he finds himself unable to hold a steady job, Berry begins to work outside the house to help make ends meet, despite Eddie’s protests and ridicule. Only then does Berry realize that the abuse she suffers isn’t normal—and it isn’t her fault. To her credit, Berry doesn’t present herself as a saint, nor Eddie as a complete monster. In the book’s foreword, Kenneth V. Lanning, a former FBI agent and consultant in crimes against children, introduces the running theme of the book: Acquaintance or marital rape is still rape. Berry raises the interesting—and uncomfortable—specter of a teenage girl’s budding sexuality being met by the inappropriate attention of an adult who should know better. She questions society’s tacit acceptance of violence toward women, yet all in an involving story of her background, adult life and gradual awakening to her own situation, along with her demand for something better for herself and her children. Berry—an award-winning journalist in her native West Virginia—is an engaging writer, her style fluid and easy to read, with welcome touches of humor and sustained tension throughout. The ending isn’t quite as resolved as one would hope, given that the events described seem to be well in the past, but Berry gives her maturing awareness and growing strength an intriguing, thought-provoking treatment.
An engaging though disturbing view of rape and child abuse from a seldom-seen perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615388601
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Nellie Bly
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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