mono_vox (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mono_vox) wrote,@ 2008-02-26 18:33:00 |
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50 books in 1 year - 2008 - # 4
Don’t you just love it when you judge a book by it's cover and it turns out to be far, far better?
This looks sickly sweet, but behind the sugar pink cover is a deftly told tale that hooked me after the first chapter.
Rita Mae is a little girl living on a prison island who dreams of escaping her surroundings and going to Hollywood is one which anyone growing up in a small town can get; although I never had to deal with prison riots thank gawd.
Set in the 1950s and going back to the early days of Hollwood to explain how Rita Mae's life ended up this way via her beautiful prostitute grandmother and prim, social climbing mother, Cochrane manages to paint an accurate picture of the social mores of both eras, which juxtaposes well with the depictions of the prison, where Rita Mae's feckless father works.
Although most of the characters in this book are generally well thought out and lift well off the page, I found her parents, especially her mother who bleaches her hair to hide her Mexican heritage from babyhood, one dimensional - I just couldn't believe that repressed homosexuality and hidden pasts would make a parent completely neglect and abuse a child without any hint of love at all.
There are some pretty dark moments that I didn’t see coming but by the end, when things can’t get any worse, there is a sense of hope, which takes this from gritty to something far less predictable and special.
This looks sickly sweet, but behind the sugar pink cover is a deftly told tale that hooked me after the first chapter.
Rita Mae is a little girl living on a prison island who dreams of escaping her surroundings and going to Hollywood is one which anyone growing up in a small town can get; although I never had to deal with prison riots thank gawd.
Set in the 1950s and going back to the early days of Hollwood to explain how Rita Mae's life ended up this way via her beautiful prostitute grandmother and prim, social climbing mother, Cochrane manages to paint an accurate picture of the social mores of both eras, which juxtaposes well with the depictions of the prison, where Rita Mae's feckless father works.
Although most of the characters in this book are generally well thought out and lift well off the page, I found her parents, especially her mother who bleaches her hair to hide her Mexican heritage from babyhood, one dimensional - I just couldn't believe that repressed homosexuality and hidden pasts would make a parent completely neglect and abuse a child without any hint of love at all.
There are some pretty dark moments that I didn’t see coming but by the end, when things can’t get any worse, there is a sense of hope, which takes this from gritty to something far less predictable and special.
