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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Joan Allen fails to breathe sufficient life into Alice Sebold's second novel to make it worth the listen, but she really doesn't have much to work with. Helen Knightly, a divorced mother of two grown daughters, impulsively murders her 88-year-old mother, Claire. The story then flips back and forth between Helen's response to her present-day act and long flashbacks exploring her love/hate relationships with her emotionally volatile, agoraphobic mother and her suicidal, peculiarly obsessed father. Allen's calm, even voice makes Helen's most irrational actions (smothering her mother, cutting her clothes off, bathing her dead body and dragging it down to the basement) sound nearly as reasonable to listeners as they do to Helen. Allen also marvelously evokes the cracked, demented tones of Helen's aged mother. Unfortunately, the older Claire Knightly appears in only the smallest portion of the book, and Allen barely troubles to distinguish the voices of the other characters. Her unvarying voice, combined with the tediously introspective text, make this audio a real slog.
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
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