An upsetting, affecting novel about an attempt to understand trauma.
A young woman grapples with a long history of sexual abuse in this debut novel.
In Montreal in 1967, 16-year-old Rose’s family has a secret: Her father has been molesting her for years. “I had always been compliant because he had enslaved me at such a young age,” writes Rose as an adult, looking back. “I knew nothing else and until a few years earlier I hadn’t known how wrong this was. Stepford child. Once under his control, I believed I was complicit.” She now manages to avoid her father’s abuse, but she still can’t bring herself to tell her mother about it—although she suspects that she already knows. Rose later goes to college, where she channels her rage into radical politics and drug experimentation. A boyfriend suspects that she’s been abused, although she can’t talk to him about it, either. With the benefit of time—and years of therapy—an adult Rose recounts her story, interspersing her current thoughts between her memories. Other pieces of information are revealed, such as how her father forced her and her brother, Tom, to engage in sexual acts; and how her father had other victims, outside the family, who contacted her later—sometimes in an accusatory manner. As Rose tries to uncover the full scope of what happened to her, Nadler leaps between present and past—featuring Rose the character and Rose the investigator. It results in a fragmented text that effectively suggests the simultaneity of trauma and memory. Chapters are separated by lists, poems, short vignettes, and other items that feel pulled straight from a diary; Nadler’s prose also displays a strong preference for staccato sentences, as well as dramatic imagery: “I was relegated to the back rooms of [my mother’s] consciousness. The back rooms where cigars were smoked and poker played. The back rooms where shady deals were made. Where she would never go.” Although this stylistic choppiness does become overwhelming, at times the book’s sheer emotional weight offers a powerful reading experience.
An upsetting, affecting novel about an attempt to understand trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2498-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
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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