A retelling of the lives of two sisters, separated as young teenagers when each was caught in an undertow of drugs, prostitution, and mental institutions. But award-winning novelist Flook (You Have the Wrong Man, 1996, etc.), the younger of the sisters, seems to miss the point: This is a fairy tale, the story of Snow White and Rose Red, of a narcissistic (wicked queen) mother and a helpless (king) father. Rose Red (sister Karen) flees into the forest when she is only 14 with her almost-50-year-old lover. Karen begins her new life by pasting thousands of stolen Green Stamps into books to trade for merchandise she can sell. Pretty soon, she's trading her own body for cash that she hides in a hollowed-out Bible. Her Snow White sister, 12-year-old Maria, left behind, is obsessed with her loss of Karen—and also with her mother's various cruelties. Mother Veronica, a Vivian Leigh look-alike but ``more sultry,'' made her husband her priority, flirted often and obviously with other men, and faithfully tuned out her children. Father Ray, who might have reversed the family's downward spiral, foolishly stayed true to his wife even when his daughters began disappearing into psychiatric wards. As a writer, Flook shadows her sister's life, recording poignant and (literally) pregnant moments. Their babies are born at close to the same time; their mates stalk them similarly. Karen escapes from her man by jumping down two stories from a fire escape with her baby in her arms; Maria escapes from hers when Karen bashes him with a can of drain cleaner. Twenty years later, they both have new husbands, new children, and a fresh perspective on their mother, now a widow in an upscale retirement castle. Flook's book should sing with pain, but it's strangely flat, if skillfully written—the reflections of her reflections, minus the power of myth.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44208-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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