There's already literally 2,000 reviews of this 1992 Wally Lamb novel blessed by Oprah on amazon.com so I'm not going to add to the clutter or go into detail, except to say this has got to be the least appealing heroine of a novel since Scarlett O'Hara, and at least that bitch saved her family during a war. Although Delores Price has some trauma in her life -- a stillborn baby brother, parents divorced, her mother going into a mental institute for awhile, her own rape by a tenant -- even so, I never felt like that was an excuse for her to be the nastiest person on earth to everyone she encountered. Cutting herself off from the people around her just made her situation worse.
I kept waiting for her to finally get her comeuppance, as if all that came before wasn't enough, and it wasn't, and yet she still has a somewhat happy ending.
It made me think about my own traumas. There has been spans of time where I let myself use them as an excuse, but no one should because you can get past it.
It also made me think about where the publishing industry is going. Pocket Books has this priced at $7.99, and I can assume they made their money on it when they sold it, but since then, it has been bought and resold on amazon.com several times over. I bought it from someone for $1.99 and I'm reselling it for $1.98, and Pocket gets none of that. The book industry should be embracing the electronic book platform because it eliminates all this aftermarket reselling which takes away from their sales.
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