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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Sebold's disappointing second novel (after much-lauded The Lovely Bones) opens with the narrator's statement that she has killed her mother. Helen Knightly, herself the mother of two daughters and an art class model old enough to be the mother of the students who sketch her nude figure, is the dutiful but resentful caretaker for her senile 88-year-old mother, Clair. One day, traumatized by the stink of Clair's voided bowels and determined to bathe her, Helen succumbs to a life-long dream and smothers Clair, who had sucked the life out of [Helen] day by day, year by year. After dragging Clair's corpse into the cellar and phoning her ex-husband to confess her crime, Helen has sex with her best friend's 30-year-old blond-god doofus son. Jumping between past and present, Sebold reveals the family's fractured past (insane, agoraphobic mother; tormented father, dead by suicide) and creates a portrait of Clair that resembles Sebold's own mother as portrayed in her memoir, Lucky. While Helen has clearly suffered at her mother's hands, the matricide is woefully contrived, and Helen's handling of the body and her subsequent actions seem almost slapstick. Sebold can write, that's clear, but her sophomore effort is not in line with her talent. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Listeners might be more easily absorbed into this brief lyrical novel were they not told in its opening sentences that the storyÕs narrator has just suffocated her rapidly deteriorating mother. From that point on, the story is told as a flashback involving an only child, a mentally ill mother, and a father who finally succeeds at suicide. Flashback requires reflection. Despite Joan AllenÕs more than adequate rendering, audio by nature pushes ahead, not leaving a lot of space between the words. Repetition and slight variation, two of SeboldÕs strong points on the page, become petty annoyances. New-age musical interludes between chapters are out of place with the tone of the novel. In this case, SeboldÕs excellent writing has to be read on the page to be fully appreciated. R.R. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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