She's Come Undone

March 29, 1993
In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40; her relentless parade of disasters makes for interesting reading.

August 3, 1992
In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40. The troubled product of a stormy marriage, she is already sipping Maalox in grade school. Then her father walks out on her mother, who suffers a nervous collapse, and Dolores moves to her repressive grandmother's house in Rhode Island. By the time she reaches eighth grade, she has only one friend: a boarder who eventually rapes her. Anesthetizing herself with junk food and soap operas, Dolores becomes an obese, isolated young woman who attempts suicide during her first semester in college and spends seven years in a mental institution. Oddly enough, this relentless parade of disasters makes for interesting reading. The author keenly evokes his protagonist's profound alienation and self-loathing, endowing Dolores with a bleak sense of humor that keeps readers rooting for her. Ironically, the book itself ``comes undone'' as its heroine develops self-esteem, at which point an absorbing portrait of a woman on a collision course with her problems turns into a disappointing series of cliches about love, forgiveness and Dolores's ticking biological clock. Nonetheless, this is a promising debut.

May 1, 1992
An award-winning creative writing teacher has created a compelling first novel whose heroine reflects on her troubled journey from childhood to middle age. Bruised by her parents' divorce, her mother's breakdown, and brutal betrayal by a neighbor, Dolores Price tries to retreat from life. Overwhelming anger and defiance frequently blind her to the needs of others, yet even in despair she battles for love and acceptance, supported by some delightfully unconventional friends. There are no simple solutions, but from the shattered remains of her dysfunctional family, she binds together a new beginning. Her struggles to understand pain and achieve forgiveness resonate with a sense of life's complexities. Dolores is not always likable, but her story combines sorrow and wonder in a remarkable way. Recommended for most fiction collections.-- Jan Blodgett, St. Mary's Cty. Records Ctr. & Archives, Leonardtown, Md.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 1992
"She" is Dolores Price, a character few readers will soon forget. In this first novel by an award-winning short-story writer and teacher of writing, Dolores tells her own story from age four in 1956 to the present. Tragedy stalks Dolores and the people she loves: desertion, divorce, madness, rape, isolation, disease, and death, plus the routine cruelties and ordinary betrayals of daily life. But there are lifelines in Dolores' world: her fragile but gritty mother and repressed but caring grandmother; a closeted gay high school counsellor who sees potential behind the adolescent Dolores' smart-aleck talk and layers of fat; an eccentric, resilient tattoo-artist neighbor; a hippie family she encounters as it takes off for Woodstock; the psychiatrist whose strong commitment helps Dolores move, over several years, from withdrawal and attempted suicide to reengagement with reality; the man she selects as her first love and then outgrows; the man who insists on becoming her second love. Somehow, unaccountably, Lamb has managed to climb inside the head of a troubled young woman and watch the passing show through her eyes; every twist and turn in her hilarious, horrifying, emotionally wrenching journey seems inevitable. "She's Come Undone" is a novel worth reading by a writer worth watching. ((Reviewed Aug. 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)