Halfborn Woman V. Diane WoodBrown

Product Description A poignant, breathtaking debut, Halfborn Woman is the story of Arlen, a painfully observant girl who comes of age in early '70s Tampa, Florida. When Arlen's charming rogue of a father walks out on the family, everything changes, and her mother, Olivia, a woman whose passion and insecurity make her difficult in the best of times, now rides a terrifying slide between depression and rage.Arlen is left to play handmaiden and cheerleader to a woman who, feeling brutally rejected, now rejects her. Only in tthe aftermath of one of her mother's increasingly frequent beatings can Arlen find something like the love she's been denied, finally cradled in Livvi's apologetic arms. Nor can she find any real support in the new life her father has created for himself and the irredeemably banal trophy wife he's picked up. And, trying desperately to make her way between these two worlds, Arlen finds herself ever more lost.Unable to accept the true affection of her first boyfriend, Shems, she experiments instead with the fascination she is able to engender in a middle-aged neighbor. But nowhere is she able to replace the love she feels her mother denies her. And as her life at home moves almost inevitably into deepending cycles of abuse, Arlen soon begins to test her own limits-and those of the life that now traps her.With language that is as surefooted as it is evocative, Woodbrown has written a book that will captivate every reader who knows the pain and promise of young womanhood, as well as every reader who wants to remember it. From Publishers Weekly At the beginning (and end) of Woodbrown's affecting, avowedly autobiographical debut, 15-year-old Arlen Nichols lies in a Tampa emergency room, having barely survived America's bicentennial year?and a decade of abuse at the hands of her mother. Like Judith Rossner's recent Perfidia, Arlen's first-person sickbed meditation tells the tale of an adolescent girl driven to desperation by her mother's alternating bouts of rage and indifference. As Arlen grows up, however, we see her gain some possibly life-saving independence from her mother's skewed vision of the world. Woodbrown deftly captures Arlen's double bind as the girl tries to please a volatile jailer while also making a painful effort to look at the world from both sides of a broken marriage. When Arlen turns her frustrated anger inward, it's hard not to feel disturbed for her sake. And yet Woodbrown reminds us repeatedly that the explanation for the abusive behavior of Arlen's mother lies in her own past as an abused child, and that Arlen's powerful imagination offers the only hope of breaking the vicious circle in future generations. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In her first novel, Woodbrown brings readers close in to the From Kirkus Reviews A cheerless and schematic coming-of-age novel, Florida-set, limns a thin tale of unsuitable mothers, weak fathers, and, of course, horribly messed-up daughters. Rushed to a hospital after attempting suicide, 15-year old Arlen decides it's time to tell her story. It's not her first hospital visit; that occurred when she was six. As her parents quarreled on Easter Sunday, she lost an eye in an accident while playing in the garden with brother Ryan. Arlen has had a tough middle-class life, growing up without love because her mother Olivia doesn't know how to offer it. And, all things considered, perhaps she shouldn't be expected to. For as Olivia, who came of age in the early '60s, found out too lateone marriage and three children too lateshe's not a natural mother. She's no good at nurturing or keeping house, and she should have been anywhere other than stuck at home with three kids. After divorcing Arlen's dad, Ransome, she abused the children, left them alone without telling them where she was going, and became terminally self- absorbed. Still, Olivia's not a monster, Woodbrown seems to suggest, but a product hersel