T. Greenwood (1)

Rust & Stardust is the story of Sally Horner, the eleven-year-old girl whose kidnapping by Frank LaSalle inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and to whom Humbert Humbert refers when he asks, “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” It is the opposite of “Lolita”, telling Sally’s story from her point of view. The story also follows a classmate who witnessed the kidnapping, Sally’s family, and a show more few people she met during her two-year ordeal. The voice we don’t hear is Frank LaSalle’s. His motives and thoughts are erased, just as Humbert Humbert erased Lolita.

T. Greenwood gives us the story of a bright and eager child who was stolen by Frank LaSalle, a pedophile who dragged her across the country to evade capture. It shows us how he was able to control her through lies and threats, counting on the credulity of a child in the face of adult lies. The outline of the story is true, though characters are imagined and obviously their thoughts and feelings are down to the empathetic imagination of the writer.

While reading Rust & Stardust, I was reminded more of Reading Lolita in Tehran than Lolita. In it, Azar Nafisi reminds us that is is “the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.” She talks of how “we only see her in passing glimpses.” Nabokov makes that very clear. “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.” T. Greenwood restores Sally to the word, as she imagines her and as her family described her.

I rushed through Rust & Stardust eager for Sally’s salvation and justice for LaSalle. I appreciate Greenwood’s skillful and tasteful way of writing about the abuse. We know it happened, but we are spared prurient detail. I know I loved My Absolute Darling that pushed the creep factor across every line ever drawn, but I was relieved by Greenwood’s discretion.

Greenwood adds to the narrative in many ways. For example, when Howard Unruh commits a mass shooting and the police seem distracted from the search for Sally, we are reminded that there is a sort of compassion fatigue that sets in, that people move on from tragedy, leaving the family feeling forgotten. We also see how the family struggles when Sally comes home to them, how the lost time also creates lost connections.

So, I did not read Wikipedia to know what happened in reality before I read this, which is probably why I was completely devastated at the end. I did read it after and certainly, the outline of the novel follows her real life and Greenwood explains who is a real person and who is imagined. This is a story that breaks your heart time and time again, but Sally’s curiosity and her ability to hold on to that brass ring will heal it every time.

Rust & Stardust will be published on August 7th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

Rust & Stardust at St. Martin’s Press | Macmillan
T. Greenwood

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/9781250164193/ show less

T. Greenwood’s story about a 1970s mother who discovers the worst about a place meant to protect and care for her youngest child is a beautiful story of love and determination. Moreover, Ms. Greenwood’s writing is so delicate and musical that I didn’t want the story to end, no matter how badly I wanted to find out what happens to little Lucy and her beleaguered mother. Mostly, I could not stop thinking about whether anything is different in 2019 now that we are more aware of neglectful show more institutions for the disabled, now that we know more about what it takes to raise a child with a disability, and now that there are significant changes to labor and delivery as well as post-partum care. I fear that not much is different forty years later.

Ms. Greenwood takes such care with her historical details that the story is a delight to read as it provides the opportunity to marvel that any of us born in the 1970s survived our childhood. As Ginny makes her way south, there are no seatbelts and no car seats. Everyone smokes like a chimney wherever they want, including in the car with the kids. Ginny signs her daughter out of the institution using nothing more than a letter as a form of identification. Cash rules the day, but when Ginny does use her credit card, she can do so without showing any identification to verify her signature. It’s insane, and yet, you can’t get upset or question her parenting or the historical details because they did happen. It was simply how things were done back then, for right or wrong.

One other historical element upon which Ms. Greenwood spends a lot of time is Ginny’s marriage and her standing in that marriage. Especially as the story rushes to its close, Ginny reflects on her unhappiness and her feelings of suffocation and regret. She recognizes the lack of equality in her marriage, one where she does all the cooking and cleaning while her beloved husband sits and reads the newspaper after dinner. She marvels at the family dynamics of those she meets along her journey, how loving and fair they seem, how thoughtful everyone is when it comes to taking care of one another. Here too is another area which makes me fear we have not come as far as we think we have when it comes to the wives in marriages. Just the other day, I read an article that talked about men, women, and free time. Every day you see a self-help headline about trying to get your husband to help around the house. This is not to mention the silence of those wives and mothers who feel just as trapped and stifled as Ginny did as they put their lives on hold to raise children. Keeping Lucy might occur more than forty years in the past, but she raises awareness of the same gender inequality that continues to exist in relationships.

In spite of everything Ginny feels and experiences, you cannot help finishing Keeping Lucy without a note of hope. Hell, if we can survive the complete lack of automobile safety in the seventies, there is hope for all of us! All kidding aside, Ms. Greenwood provides hope that even one person can make a difference. Her story is a gentle reminder that love can win out over greed and apathy and that no one has the right to make any decisions affecting your life except you. Hers is not a flashy story, and there is not a lot that happens among its pages. However, it is a peaceful story that helps you find the good in this seemingly hellish world in which we now find ourselves. Keeping Lucy is food for the soul at a time when we so desperately need it. show less

This is the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. I think I would have not been able to finish it but for the expertly nuanced narration by Therese Plummer. (Kudos to her).
So this is a fictionalized account of the real life abduction that has ties with Nabokov’s Lolita (Lolita has passages that reference this event; accounts differ as to Nabokov’s knowledge of this event and the timeline of his writing Lolita; but he had written a work in 1938 along these lines, so it would appear the show more idea for Lolita precedes these events; Greenwood acknowledges this in her Author’s Notes; and she takes her title from the closing lines of a poem by Humbert Humbert.)

As reprehensible as Nabokov’s fictionalized Humbert Humbert is, LaSalle/Warner/LePlante here is viler.

Thanks to Greenwood for giving Sally a voice. show less

There is a nonfiction account of Sally Horner’s story that is garnering a lot of media press lately, which is unfortunate because from what I have been hearing, it is not the greatest reading experience. It is also unfortunate that the nonfiction version is getting all of the publicity because T. Greenwood’s fictionalized version is so very, very good. With the freedom of fiction, Ms. Greenwood places us into the mind of Sally and that of her mother and sister so that they are once again show more alive and vibrant and telling their collective story so that all may know what happened during those lost years at the end of the 1940s.

Rust & Stardust is not an easy novel to read. While Ms. Greenwood does not get explicit in the forms of abuse Sally experiences, she provides enough contextual clues to understand just what is happening to Sally at any given time. This understanding is enough to turn your stomach and is most definitely a trigger for readers sensitive to pedophilia and other forms of child abuse. While it would be easy to say that such knowledge is not necessary to Sally’s story, Ms. Greenwood presents it in such a way to understand not only her experiences but also her frame of mind during and after her abduction. In turn, this helps frame her state of mind that leads to her ultimate fate. It may be some of the most difficult reading you might do, but it is vital reading if only to recognize the mental trauma such sustained abuse causes Sally and the strains placed on her relationships with her sister and mother as a result of her trauma.

Because of the sensitive nature of her subject, Ms. Greenwood tiptoes delicately through the grimier aspects of Sally’s story. She provides Sally with a modicum of privacy within her most horrific scenes. Some of this privacy is out of necessity if only because we truly have no idea what Sally thought or felt throughout her ordeal. However, even among those aspects of the story in which Ms. Greenwood had to utilize her imagination, her speculations are so realistic that you forget you are reading fiction. In point of fact, Ms. Greenwood’s diligent and very thorough research shines among the pages of Rust & Stardust so that you do not have to do any further research on your own. Adding to that is Ms. Greenwood’s ability to paint a picture, which is so good that you have no need to Google Sally and find the images to which Ms. Greenwood refers throughout the story.

To that end, Rust & Stardust is an excellent historical fiction novel specifically because Ms. Greenwood not only did her homework on her chosen subject but also presents it in such a way that blurs the line between fiction and reality. It is easy to forget that Sally’s story is real, that Sally herself was real, and that she did endure years of sexual, physical, and mental abuse at the hands of her abductor. That her story inspired Vladimir Nabokov only serves to make his classic story even more disturbing – because it forces us to realize that for all his rationalizations, Humbert Humbert really is a disgusting and depraved character, something not so easy to realize while reading it.

Sally’s story is a tough one, and there will be times you will set it aside thinking you cannot possibly get through it, but there is something so beautiful about Rust & Stardust that it bears continuing with it. Sally may have undergone horrific situations, but her family never gave up on her. They continued to search and pushed the police to continue their searches. They offered rewards, even though money was tight. They physically searched areas themselves. They fought, and Sally fought. That is the story worth telling and worth experiencing. That we should never succumb to what is happening to us but continue to fight to achieve our goals – whether they are to lose weight, travel more, or escape your abductor. For the many instances of a roiling stomach her story causes, Ms. Greenwood’s Rust & Stardust is a beautiful, sensitive novel that provides you more insight into the Horner family than a certain other nonfiction publication out on the shelves right now. show less