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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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