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Title: Lucky by Alice Sebold ISBN: 0684857820 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: August, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62
Rating: 5
Summary: A TRIUMPH OVER TRAGEDY
Comment: Like her wonderful novel The Lovely Bones - which I've also reviewed and which you must read - Lucky is a harrowing, heart-wrenching book about the worst possible thing that can happen to a woman. Alice Sebold tells the raw story of her rape ordeal and her subsequent struggle for recovery with an honesty and warmth which is compelling. Lucky reads almost like a novel itself at times, with gripping moments of suspense, particularly during the court trial scenes.
Alice Sebold was the innocent victim of an unforgivable crime - but she doesn't ask for our sympathy or pity in these beautifully written pages. She earns our respect and admiration for the courageous way she tells how the traumatic events changed and shaped her life; how the naive college student would eventually become a hardened, determined aggressor herself in her brave fight for justice against her attacker. Sadly, this natural reaction to her personal violation came with a price - destructive behavioural damage that brought a later downward spiral into drugs. What the author didn't know at the time is that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; an anxiety syndrome that emerges following a psychologically distressing traumatic event such as rape, which she battles to overcome.
Can someone really, truly, get over something so savage and brutal as rape is the numbing thought you're left with long after you put the book aside? The past can never be forgotten, but Alice Sebold has managed to crawl from the wreckage and move on with her life to a happier future that has brought her international fame and acclaim. That says something about the human spirit - and everything about this remarkable woman.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lucky
Comment: The raw and brutal honesty in Sebold's true-life account of a rape and its legal and emotional consequences is horrifying, disturbing, and altogether difficult to stomach. She is an 18-year-old college freshman in Syracuse, New York, when a man assaults her on a dark road and rapes her. During the aftermath of the attack, Sebold's family members try to comfort her and support her desire to prosecute, but they barely understand. Often Sebold is the most courageous one of all. In an increasingly dangerous succession of events, she turns to alcohol, drugs, and unhealthy relationships to cope with the stigma rape survivors bear. Eventually, the same kind of strength that carried her through the attack and years of the trial resurfaces, and she becomes successful and happy and, as her work attests, an excellent writer as well. This book will be painful, and perhaps helpful, to other rape survivors.
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful, Heart Wrenching, Stunning
Comment: It's hard to truly imagine what it's like to be raped, but after reading Alice Sebold's searing memoir I have an all-too vivid picture of its brutality, the emotional toll it exacts, and the impact it can have on one's relationships with family, friends and lovers.
Sebold weaves her brutal tale with flashbacks of her family life, her parent's and sister's reaction to the rape and the reactions of those close to her. Instead of being supportive, her father casts blame on her. Her self-absorbed mother who suffers from episode's of anxiety attacks cannot even attend her own daughter's court case when her attacker is brought to trial.
Alice Sebold makes the reader painfully aware of the lonliness the victim suffers. Treated like a pariah by both the women and the men on campus, where she is a freshman in college, Alice has to struggle each day just to continue her college education amidst an atmosphere where she is ignored, gossiped about and treated like she is damaged goods by boys she longs to date and befriend.
The ironic title of the story reflects a remark made by a policeman after she reports her crime that she is lucky to have survived. Another rape victim was found murdered in the very spot where Alice was raped. Alice's rape was her initiation into sex. She was a virgin when she was raped, making the crime against all the more cruel.
But Alice is lucky in a way. She has true courage and prevails in this searing story that includes a gripping court room drama, complex characters and writing at its finest.
I picked up this book because I enjoyed the Lovely Bones, and was not disappointed by Lucky, which captivated me as much as her novel did.
Sebold is a gifted writer. Lucky is compelling, powerful and ultimately heart-wrenching without being at all sensational or melodramatic. The book never falters from its first page to the end, taking the reader on a journey that is both powerful and poignant, disturbing and inspirational.
Sebold illuminates a brutal subject with brillance and sensitivity. She evokes the horrors of rape -- both physical and psychological -- with such realistically rendered scenes, eloquence and honesty and weaves such a stunning tale that the reader can't help but be captivated. I couldn't put the book down and read it in two days. I can't wait for Sebold's next book.
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Title: The Lovely Bones: A Novel by Alice Sebold ISBN: 0316666343 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer ISBN: 0375412824 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Nanny Diaries: A Novel by Emma McLaughlin, Nicola Kraus ISBN: 0312278586 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Blessings by Anna Quindlen ISBN: 0375502238 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan ISBN: 0385503954 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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