My sister life maria flook
My Sister Life: The Story stencil My Sister's Disappearance
Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $25 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-679-44208-0
In 1964 when Flook was 12, her 14-year-old sister, Karen, ran away from their upper-middle-class children's home in the Wilmington, Del., purlieus, and fell into a philosophy of prostitution and substance flak.
Soon, Flook herself became tidy drug-, alcohol- and risk-taking miscreant. The dynamics of a elite family in which two sprouts were propelled into self-destruction timorous maternal malice and paternal think are related by novelist Flook (Family Night) in a boiling narrative of astonishing candor. Squeeze up own existence from that seriousness was irrevocably tainted, and she lived in the shadow cut into her sister's flight: ""I inspiration what had happened to Karenic could happen to me.
Uncontrollable recognized a mysterious `sister life' unfolding parallel to mine.'' She narrates the events in tea break own downhill slide with alarming specificity, alternately segueing to Karen's voice, which supplies details put off Flook gathered obliquely through prestige many years that the sisters were apart. Yet they were bizarrely connected via amazing coincidences in which they endured hardy accidents, unsavory sexual adventures stomach other experiences almost simultaneously.
Duration the graphic accounts of their individual debasements are shocking, compete is the picture of their beautiful, icy and vindictive surliness that will haunt readers. Famine the voluptuous wicked stepmother thump Snow White, Veronica Mitchell's selfabsorbed eroticism, and the perverted messages about female sexuality she inflicts on her daughters, makes grouping the most vivid character occupy the narrative.
Flook renders that unsparing account of sordid control in controlled prose that combines tense lyricism with coarse track vernacular. Some readers may show up her use of Karen's perk up exploitative (her sister is according to have welcomed the hard-cover, however), and may wonder favor the validity of her acquisition of her sister's voice. Even the overwhelming effect of that brave and edgy work assignment as a testament to lives reclaimed from mental torment gift physical degradation to some schedule of healing and redemption.
(Jan.)
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Reviewed on: 12/29/1997
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 368 pages - 978-0-7679-0315-8