The Big Girls

The use of multiple narrators in this BBC production provides an interesting performance. This choice is logical as Moore's crime novel contains lots of dialogue and characters with distinct personalities. The story is mostly set at Sloatsbury Women's Prison, and the main characters include prisoners, the chief of psychiatry, corrections officers, and Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet. The narration is delivered in the alternating voices of four women: Helen, a schizophrenic inmate; Dr. Forrest, Captain Bradshaw, and Angie. The cast reads the hypnotic prose deftly. Voices are well suited to their credible and authentic characters. This heartbreaking novel feels like watching a train wreck that you can't stop. S.C.A. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 19, 2007
In spare yet hypnotic prose, Moore (One Last Look
) examines the bond between a young psychiatrist and a mentally ill patient in her devastating sixth novel, set at an upstate New York federal women's prison. Sloatsburg Correctional Institution, a former sanitarium on the west bank of the Hudson, is dangerous, understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmingly grim. The place epitomizes what's wrong with our nation's prison system and stands as a warning about our growing mental health crisis. Moore deftly shifts perspective among her principal characters—Dr. Louise Forrest, Sloatsburg's psychiatry chief; Helen Nash, a suicidal inmate who's been convicted of killing her children; Capt. Henry "Ike" Bradshaw, a corrections officer who's in love with Louise; and Angie Mills, a Hollywood actress (and Louise's ex-husband's girlfriend), whom Helen believes is her long-lost sister—as the action hurtles to an oddly satisfying resolution. Reading this heartbreaker is like watching a train wreck while dialing for help on your cellphone. You can't turn away. 75,000 printing; author tour.