A thoughtful, measured tone gives this tale of murder a sense of depth and reach, like a good poem.
Chilling, edgy backgrounder on the high-profile 2002 murder of a fashion journalist.
It was a nasty piece of work: 36 hours passed before a former lover entered Christa Worthington’s Cape Cod home and found her corpse, with her toddler daughter nursing at her breast. Such a lurid case has already attracted lots of coverage, but Flook applies to the tale a fine hand for characterization, whether spun out or pinched to a paragraph. The “piebald gymkhana” of suspects attains a prismatic quality, though sympathy is kept at arm’s length. The author doesn’t just scan those within the “orbit of opportunity” for killing Worthington, but all the denizens of Truro, Massachusetts, from the swamp Yankees to the parvenus with their trophy homes. Often mythologized as an artists’ colony, Truro is really “Nowheresville,” claims crotchety poet and resident Alan Dugan, with its “wannabe artists, dilettantes, losers, pirates and profiteers, eccentrics and misfits.” And novelist/memoirist Flook (My Sister Life, 1998, etc.), too: she lives in the town and quietly, appealingly insinuates herself into the story. Her clinically precise portrait limns Worthington as a gifted writer whose unusual style—part alchemy, part anthropology—set her apart in the world of “icy fashionistas and wage-war garmentos.” But she was also a house-wrecker and a stalker; as the district attorney covering the case said, “The more we look at her, the uglier she gets.” Flook remains, at least on the surface, nonjudgmental; she allows the characters to hang—or exonerate—themselves. She’s also very good on Truro’s landscape, the remoteness that’s kept the town charmed and protected, though it has its share of notorious history. Even her conjectures and color commentary have the grace of authority.
A thoughtful, measured tone gives this tale of murder a sense of depth and reach, like a good poem.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-1374-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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