THE HUMPTY DUMPTYS

Name: THE HUMPTY DUMPTYS
Author: Greta Sherman
ISBN: 978-0990808800

by Greta Sherman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2014

A heartbreaking tale about a family ripped apart by mental illness and abuse, but one that might have been better condensed.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.