She's Come Undone (Oprah's Book Club)
by Wally Lamb
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wally LambEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-06-01
ISBN: 0671021001
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Pocket Books
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Book Reviews of She's Come Undone (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: Undone, Unraveled, Untied, are you ready to enter in?
Summary: 5 Stars
Suspense, death, real life situations, threats of suicide, and insane asylums make She Comes Undone a top rated book. Wally Lamb does a wonderful job portraying Dolores character. I did not pay attention to who the author was until I was flipping through the book and caught a glimpse of a man's picture, I was astonished to say the lest that the author was a man. This book travels through Dolores life from around age eight to age twenty-five, showing how much one person really does change through the course of their life and also how much of the person we were when we were eight will still be with us when we reach the ripe old age of ninety-ninety.Our first encounter with Dolores is with her mother, watching two delivery men bring in their very first black and white television, courtesy of her father's "boss" or how others may say it, mistress. (Who knew the foreshadowing taking place with the television by the author, since television becomes such a huge part of her life later?) Dolores seems like fairly normal little girl but the reader can tell that her life must not be as it seems because trouble must be lurking around the next corner. We enjoy of few pages of normal life in the Price family but soon the bomb falls, Dolores mother loses her full term unborn baby tragically and everything stable in their lives comes undone. Soon Dolores picturesque portrait of life in the good neighbor hood, with expensive cars, backyard pools, and childhood best friends goes up in flames with the news of her parents divorce. She turns almost immediately to hating her beloved Father for leaving her all alone with a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After it is decided her mother cannot take care of her anymore and needs to be put in a place to help her focus on the will to keep living, Dolores is sent to live with her grandmother in Rhode Island. Her Grandmother is like a rose, inside she is truly beautiful but she is also covered with many painful thorns, which can wound anyone who gets to close. Time goes on and Dolores's mother comes back to live with them, ready to live but still very fragile. Dolores is now in the teenage years and just about to fall into a downward spiral. She become very close friends with the man from the apartment above her and then her trust is broken in a man once again, when he rapes her out of the blue one day. From that point on she becomes a very inside person, she does not talk to kids at school, she barely glances at her grandmother, and only shares a few words with her mother from time to time. Dolores's only companions become television and her beloved sweet candy and soda. As she nears graduation her mother pushes her towards attending college and Dolores fights her with every once of energy she can muster and it seems that Dolores will win but something horrible happens and she feels as though she must attend college even if she does become a failure, she must try. She goes to college and tries to play a person she is not and only traumatizes herself even more. She meets many different people and is introduced to her first love in a very unique way. Although, people are mean, and they almost push her off the deep end but thankfully she is saved just before and placed in an asylum where she spends seven years getting a new handle on life. When she re-enters the world, she is a different person, still naïve and scared but now she has the will to survive and thrive. She still makes mistakes but in the Dolores Price makes it out on the top.
Wally Lamb did a wonderful job with this story, almost every page makes you try to read even faster to find out what is going to happen next. Every aspect of Dolores personality was there, there was nothing left to explain or question, it is as if the reader is able to enter into her and while reading the book actually becomes Dolores. He deserves as much credit for this book as he can get. If you are looking for a book and are ready for a truly eye opening experience, try She Comes Undone, you will not be disappointed.
Summary of She's Come Undone (Oprah's Book Club)
In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1997: "Mine is a story of craving; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered." So begins the story of Dolores Price, the unconventional heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Dolores is a class-A emotional basket case, and why shouldn't she be? She's suffered almost every abuse and familial travesty that exists: Her father is a violent, philandering liar; her mother has the mental and emotional consistency of Jell-O; and the men in her life are probably the gender's most loathsome creatures. But Dolores is no quitter; she battles her woes with a sense of self-indulgence and gluttony rivaled only by Henry VIII. Hers is a dysfunctional Wonder Years, where growing up in the golden era was anything but ideal. While most kids her age were dealing with the monumental importance of the latest Beatles single and how college turned an older sibling into a long-haired hippie, Dolores was grappling with such issues as divorce, rape, and mental illness. Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world.
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