books tagged “dysfunctional”

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Anywhere But Here
by Mona Simpson

ISBN 0571201377 (0-571-20137-7)
Softcover, Faber & Faber Ltd

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Ardent Women: The History of the Federation of Saint Benedict
by Olivia Forsier

ISBN 096520443X (0-9652044-3-X)
Softcover, Park Pr Quality Printing Inc

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- Ardent Women: The History of the Federation of Saint Benedict: ISBN 096520443X (0-9652044-3-X)
  Softcover, Park Pr Quality Printing Inc
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum
by Kate Atkinson

ISBN 1568953739 (1-56895-373-9)
Softcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
"I exist!" exclaims Ruby Lennox upon her conception in 1951, setting the tone for this humorous and poignant first novel in which Ruby at once celebrates and mercilessly skewers her middle-class English family. Peppered with tales of flawed family traits passed on from previous generations, Ruby's narrative examines the lives in her disjointed clan, which revolve around the family pet shop. But beneath the antics of her philandering father, her intensely irritable mother, her overly emotional sisters, and a gaggle of eccentric relatives are darker secrets--including an odd "feeling of something long forgotten"--that will haunt Ruby for the rest of her life. Kate Atkinson earned a Whitbread Prize in 1995 for this fine first effort. [via]
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The Bone People
by Keri Hulme

ISBN 1417702931 (1-4177-0293-1)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitora speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.
Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.
[via]
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The Child Called It
by David J. Pelzer

ISBN 0929099028 (0-929099-02-8)
Softcover, Maun Lemke

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- The Child Called It: ISBN 0929099028 (0-929099-02-8)
  Softcover, Maun Lemke
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A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive
by Dave Pelzer

ISBN 1558743669 (1-55874-366-9)
Softcover, Hci

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Book summary:
David J. Pelzer's mother, Catherine Roerva, was, he writes in this ghastly, fascinating memoir, a devoted den mother to the Cub Scouts in her care, and somewhat nurturant to her children--but not to David, whom she referred to as "an It." This book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors, forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic mom. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably, his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved David. One wants to learn more about his ordeal and its aftermath, and now he's written a sequel, The Lost Boy, detailing his life in the foster-care system.
Though it's a grim story, A Child Called "It" is very much in the tradition of Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul and the many books in that upbeat series, whose author Pelzer thanks for helping get his book going. It's all about weathering adversity to find love, and Pelzer is an expert witness. [via]
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- A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive: ISBN 1558743669 (1-55874-366-9)
  Softcover, Hci
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen

ISBN 0312421273 (0-312-42127-3)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
"...a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes." [via]
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Emotionally Weird
by Kate Atkinson

ISBN 031227999X (0-312-27999-X)
Softcover, Picador USA

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Book summary:
Readers who survive the first 20 pages of this dense and playful novel, with its three different openings, constant jokes, and crowded cast of characters, will find themselves rewarded with a leisurely postmodern romp through the student ferment and bodily indulgences of the early 1970s. Although the publisher has called Emotionally Weird a comic novel, it is essentially unclassifiable, both further-reaching and less "meaningful" than it first appears. Kate Atkinson's book begins with chapter 1 of a bad murder mystery being written by Effie Andrews for a creative-writing course at the University of Dundee in 1972. But the action soon shifts to a wintry island in the Hebrides, where Effie is trying to elicit the story of her parentage from her single mother, Nora, while spinning a humorous first-person narrative of her college life. Only near the end of the book does she finally wrench the story from her mother: Effie's bizarre origins; the identity of her father; and the whole unlikely tale of her mother's family.
Like a Borgesian labyrinth, with other stories thrown in, including a laughably convenient introduction of magic realism, it is impossible to know what to take seriously--or "jocoseriously," to paraphrase another of Atkinson's influences: the Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In her third novel, much of Atkinson's humor is incidental, even parenthetical. (We are told in passing, for example, that Effie's dissertation is called "Henry James: Man or Maze?") She is at her best when introducing her eccentric characters, such as the elderly Professor Cousins, who is sometimes lucid, sometimes not. "As with anyone in the department," Effie explains, "it wasn't always easy to distinguish between the two states. The university's strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk." Professor Cousins, like the author, enjoys word games along the order of those in Alice in Wonderland, and Atkinson's use of Scottish idiom comes to function as a sort of word game. She also brings in a few killjoys (a militant feminist, a militant Christian, a literary theorist) to complicate an already loopy narrative and to spike the punch.
Janice smelt of piety and coal tar soap. She had recently become a Christian, a neophyte of a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corridors of Airlie, Belmont and Chalmers Halls looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the Bible to fill in the spaces where their personalities should have been.
As Emotionally Weird develops, Atkinson relies more and more on the postmodern gag of characters commenting on the unfolding action. There is no telling how she finally draws these disparate threads onto a single spool, but in the end, even the slightest subplots are neatly tied up and the most transient characters accounted for. --Regina Marler [via]
More editions of Emotionally Weird:
- Emotionally Weird: ISBN 0312203241 (0-312-20324-1)
  Hardcover, St Martins Pr
- Emotionally Weird: ISBN 031227999X (0-312-27999-X)
  Softcover, Picador USA
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families
by Charles L. Whitfield

ISBN 0932194400 (0-932194-40-0)
Softcover, Hci

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- Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families: ISBN 0932194400 (0-932194-40-0)
  Softcover, Hci
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Las Correcciones
by Jonathan Franzen, Ramon Buenaventura

ISBN 9584203274 (958-42-0327-4)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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Book summary:
Las Correcciones / The Corrections (Spanish Edition) (View amazon detail page) ASIN: 9584203274 [via]
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- Las Correcciones: ISBN 9584203274 (958-42-0327-4)
  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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Naked
by David Sedaris

ISBN 1568954867 (1-56895-486-7)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing. [via]
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Running With Scissors: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs

ISBN 1417666943 (1-4176-6694-3)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe [via]
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Secret Girl
by Molly Bruce Jacobs

ISBN 0312364067 (0-312-36406-7)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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More editions of Secret Girl:
- Secret Girl: ISBN 0312320949 (0-312-32094-9)
  Hardcover, St. Martin's Press
- Secret Girl: ISBN 0312364067 (0-312-36406-7)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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Shampoo Planet
by Douglas Coupland

ISBN 0671755064 (0-671-75506-4)
Softcover, Pocket Books

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Book summary:
An amazing visionary first novel about today's disenfranchised, MTV twenty-something generation and their baby boom parents, by the author of the hugely successful Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture--a Tom Robbins for the '90s who has made the cynical post-Reagan era his own. A 20-year-old's journey around America, Canada, and Paris helps him deal with the bewildering influences that confront him. [via]
More editions of Shampoo Planet:
- Shampoo Planet: ISBN 0671755056 (0-671-75505-6)
  Hardcover, Pocket Books
- Shampoo Planet: ISBN 0671755064 (0-671-75506-4)
  Softcover, Pocket Books
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Shot in the Heart
by Mikal Gilmore

ISBN 0385478003 (0-385-47800-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
"I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave."
Mikal Gilmore is a Rolling Stone writer and the youngest brother of murderer Gary Gilmore, who became, in 1977, the first person to be executed in the United States after a 10-year hiatus, a case which was subsequently recounted in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. This brave and eloquent book is the story that only Mikal Gilmore knows: the violence in multiple generations of his family, what the Gilmore house was like as he was growing up, his relationship with his brother, and his experience of the dramatic events surrounding Gary Gilmore's determination to be executed as planned, without appeal. Shot in the Heart pulls off the rare feat of conveying intense emotion without sentimentality or self-pity. The author's struggle is to set himself apart from the lurid true-crime fraternity of his father and brothers yet remain able to understand why he feels both guilty and lonely over his exclusion from his family's violent history. --Fiona Webster [via]
More editions of Shot in the Heart:
- Shot in the Heart: ISBN 0385422938 (0-385-42293-8)
  Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
- Shot in the Heart: ISBN 0385478003 (0-385-47800-3)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
by Susan Forward

ISBN 0553381407 (0-553-38140-7)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
All parents fall short from time to time. But Susan Forward pulls no punches when it comes to those whose deficiencies cripple their children emotionally. Her brisk, unreserved guide to overcoming the stultifying agony of parental manipulation--from power trips to guilt trips and all other killers of self worth--will help deal with the pain of childhood and move beyond the frustrating relationship patterns learned at home. [via]
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We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver

ISBN 1582432678 (1-58243-267-8)
Hardcover, Counterpoint

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Book summary:
In this gripping novel of motherhood gone awry, Lionel Shriver approaches the tragedy of a high-school massacre from the point of view of the killer's mother.In letters written to the boy's father, mother Eva probes the upbringing of this more-than-difficult child and reveals herself to have been the reluctant mother of an unsavory son. As the schisms in her family unfold, we draw closer to an unexpected climax that holds breathtaking surprises and its own hard-won redemption. In Eva, Shriver has created a narrator who is touching, sad, funny, and reflective. A spellbinding read, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as original as it is timely.
[via]
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Wise Children
by Angela Carter

ISBN 140583563X (1-4058-3563-X)
Softcover, Prentice Hall

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Book summary:
Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchoir Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best. [via]
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Le Correzioni
by Charles Frazier, Silvia Pareschi

ISBN 8806160370 (88-06-16037-0)
Hardcover, Einaudi

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More editions of Le Correzioni:
- Le Correzioni: ISBN 8806160370 (88-06-16037-0)
  Hardcover, Einaudi

German

Sie Nannten Mich Es
by Dave Pelzer

ISBN 3442150558 (3-442-15055-8)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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More editions of Sie Nannten Mich Es:
- Sie Nannten Mich Es: ISBN 3442150558 (3-442-15055-8)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

Spanish

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Las Corecciones
by Jonathan Franzen

ISBN 8432216461 (84-322-1646-1)
Hardcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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- Las Corecciones: ISBN 8432216461 (84-322-1646-1)
  Hardcover, Planeta Pub Corp

Dutch

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Corrections, The
by Jonathan Franzen

ISBN 0312984294 (0-312-98429-4)
Softcover

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Book summary:
Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.
All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:
Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.
Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of Corrections, The:
- Corrections, The: ISBN 0312984294 (0-312-98429-4)
  Softcover