Review by Booklist Review
Rossner's tired novel apparently seeks to fathom something new in explaining why a mother and daughter could get along so horribly that the result would be a violent death--but it never achieves that end. In her ninth novel, the author, who made her name with Looking for Mr. Goodbar, gives us Madeleine Stern, daughter of an abusive mother and a father whom she hardly knows because her parents' marriage lasted only a short time. Madeleine suffers her mother's indifference and even wrath as her mother's boyfriends come and go. Madeleine eventually gets a boyfriend, too, and he exerts a pull on her in opposition to her mother's. Madeleine goes to find and find out about her father and makes plans to attend the college where he teaches, but, back home, at a moment of concentrated abuse and rage, daughter kills mother. Obviously, college is off, then! This unrelievedly gloomy novel gives the reader not one character that could be considered anything other than stock or that anyone could care much about. And there is simply too much authorial narration at the expense of meaningful and riveting dramatization. Joyce Carol Oates is much better at this sort of psychological depiction. Expect demand based on Rossner's name. --Brad Hooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A sensational murder case has again prompted Rossner (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, etc.) to fictionalize newspaper headlines. Her story of a model high-school student who kills her alcoholic, violently abusive mother in self-defense has intriguing moments, but the psychological underpinnings of the relationship between mother and daughter prove too complex for Rossner's abilities. When she is five years old, narrator Maddy Stern is taken by her restless, amoral mother, Anita, from Hanover, N.H., where her father is a professor at Dartmouth, to Santa Fe, where Anita wholeheartedly enters into the 1970s drug and sex scene. Despite her mother's total neglect and increasingly erratic behavior, Maddy somehow absorbs the rudiments of hygiene and good manners; she willingly takes care of her younger brother, cooks and cleans, and even achieves high marks in school. Because Anita is so monstrously selfish, hurtful and mean, Rosner's attempts to explain why Maddy continues to love her mother never ring true. Maddy's references to Anita's rare moments of kindness, and to their "closeness," seem grafted upon the narrative. Most of the characters here are despicable and lack dimension: Anita and her lovers are boorish, self indulgent hippies; Maddy's father, when she finds him again, is cold and manipulative; the man who gets her pregnant is an unfeeling bully. To her credit, Rossner nicely evokes the atmosphere of Santa Fe during the art boom years, and she captures the self-involved, permissive alternate culture of the '70s with chilling recall. Rights sold in Germany; major ad/promo; author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mother-daughter conflict explodes in Rossner's latest. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author best known for her 1975 novel, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, again uses an actual murder case as inspiration for her fiction, this time in a masterful dissection of a young girl's tortured journey from mother-love to matricide. Anita Stern runs away from home when she's 16 and gives birth to her first child, out of wedlock, when she's 22. The ever- restless Anita manages to stay put for daughter Madeleine's first five years, but then the itch to wander takes hold of her again. She eventually settles in Santa Fe, moving in with a drug-dazed hippie who owns an old adobe house on Canyon Road. Demonstrating her practical brilliance, Anita soon turns the house into the road's largest art gallery; demonstrating her personal irresponsibility, she conceives a child with the hippie. But Anita loves babies. In fact, her adoration for baby Billy so completely eclipses her feelings for Madeleine that she often seems to forget that she even has a daughter. As Madeleine grows older, becoming ever more earnest and responsible in a futile effort to regain her mother's love, the hard-drinking Anita's neglect escalates to negligence (she stays out all night, or has sex in Madeleine's presence) and even physical abuse. Scarred by her mother's cruelty and by loneliness (her own first love affair ends badly), and longing for some sense of security, Madeleine finds herself locked in her adolescence into a love-hate struggle with her terrible mother--longing to return to the happiness of infancy, loathing her own ``boring neediness,'' and counting the days until her escape to college. Unfortunately, the stresses in Anita's life come to a head before Madeleine can flee. In an alcoholic rage, she attacks her daughter with a broken tequila bottle, and in fighting back, Madeleine alters both their fates. Relentless, suspenseful, and absolutely captivating. Rarely has a toxic mother-daughter love story been so expertly and convincingly evoked. (Author tour)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
