Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged childhood trauma

Elegies for the Brokenhearted

Elegies for the Brokenhearted is a book about nobodies. The narrator, Mary Murphy, is a silent observer to the destructive forces around her that ultimately shape the outcome of her life. As invisible as her ubiquitous name, Mary is a shy—and at times optionally mute—child and young adult who finds very little to care for. We first meet Mary as a young girl trying desperately to gain the (positive) attention of her mother and uncle.

Little Bird of Heaven

Oates' thirty-sixth novel grapples with familiar themes: the rocky underside of marriage, racial injustice, childhood trauma, sexual obsession, and the ways gender plays out among various subsets of the U.S. working classes. The story is set in fictitious Sparta, New York, a once thriving town seven-to-eight hours north of Manhattan. A former center of industry, the area was left high-and-dry when the factories that employed almost everyone relocated in the 1970s.
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