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: Dolores Price: The Lady of Sorrow
Summary: 4 Stars
This was a wonderful book. It had a little bit of everything; there was sadness, happiness, and drama. What I really liked about this book was that it was real, it did not tangle in a web of lies about the life of a teenage girl. It stated the truth and was not some sort of fairy tale, it was reality. This book had everything from death to living and from sexual orientation to obesity. What surprised me the most about this book, is first of all, how real Dolores Price seemed, and second of all, how the author of this book is the most unexpected person to convincingly write in a female's voice, a male.Dolores Price is a girl that most women can relate to. Traces of her can be sporadically found in all women. From her desires, to her thoughts, to her actions, most women have done or will do some of the things that Dolores Price did. The author traces her life back to the age where she's old enough to remember memories, but still too young to know if it was real or her imagination.
Her life had a fairly good start, loving parents, great home, and a wonderful place to grow up. Since she was too young to remember or comprehend some things, she felt she had a pretty good childhood. Something then turns her world upside down and from then on things get worse. Her life practically shatters and she is left trying to pick up the pieces and glue them back together.
She transitions into her teenage years, the most difficult years in a person's life, in an awkward way. After having her innocence striped from her and then gaining weight, Dolores has found no other way to be happy. She eats and eats while she sits in front of the television watching her favorite programs. She builds a wall, which is typical for a teenager, around her mother and grandmother, blocking them, and never letting them get to her. Dolores soon realized that even though it hurt her mother, she could make herself feel better by putting her mother down, and practically insulting her. In a way, I think that Dolores was just trying to get back at her mother because she believed that she caused her life to be so terrible.
By the time Dolores was eligible for college, she was also eligible for death. She was over-weight and did nothing about it, she did not see the health problems or complications, and she did not see how embarrassing it might be for her, because she could barely walk a few steps without losing her breath. Her mother and her counselor forced her into college. Dolores kept to herself at college and tried to become friends with her roommate, but instead became her personal slave. Dolores, who did not have many friends her age, took this as a real friendship, but it was also an escape from, Dottie, the cleaning lady, who was a lesbian. She ran from college because she was scared of the students and of Dottie.
As the story progresses, the reader soon finds themselves with Dolores at Gracewood Institute. It is here that Dolores begins to realize, that despite what she has done in the past, or what has been done to her, she deserves some happiness. Dolores soon moves out and follows her heart to Dante. Dante and Dolores had a complicated relationship before Dante even knew about Dolores. Dolores had been some sort of stalker, but she believed that Dante would love her the way she deserves to be loved and the way she believed she loved him. Dante soon meet Dolores, and they married. Their marriage was rocky from the start. Dolores had always put away her own needs to make sure that Dante would stay by her side. They divorced because things were not working out and because both of them soon found out that their marriage was built around lies, pretend people.
Dolores moved back to her old childhood house, her grandmother's, and decided to go back to college. This is where she finds true happiness, but she is so scared of disappointment and rejection that she does not give into this new found happiness; Thayer, a man who has a 13 year old son, and decides to go back to college for education. Dolores and Thayer soon fall in love, despite Dolores' ways of trying to keep him out of her life. Dolores was now accepted and loved.
I would recommend this book to all women, those who want a book to relate to, those who want to cry and laugh with a character, and those who just have a taste for reality but fiction books. You will be surprised at how many little things or how many things that happen to Dolores or Dolores does that you can connect with. However, this book was depressing, I was waiting for the author to bring Dolores out of her slump, but he just kept digging her deeper and deeper into depression. But that is also what made the book so good, the fact that it wasn't a fairy tale like story, with unrealistic themes and plots, it was the truth of life and how life isn't perfect, not even for characters in a book.
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 ClubŪ 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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