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Fiction. Literature. HTML:With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth that marked Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her two bestselling works of nonfiction, Anne Lamott now gives us an exuberant richly absorbing portrait of a family for whom the joys and sorrows of everyday life are magnified under the glare of the unexpected.The Fergusons make their home in a small California town where life is supposed to resemble paradise, but for thirteen-year-old Rosie (last seen in show more Lamott's beloved novel Rosie), reality is a bit harsher. Her mother, a recovering alcoholic, is still beset by grief over the early death of her first husband. Rosie's stepfather is a struggling writer plagued by doubts and hilarious paranoia. And Rosie, aching in the bloom of young womanhood and obsessed with tournament tennis, finds that her athletic gifts, initially a source of triumph, now place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers seems to be developing an obsession of his own.
Written with enormous emotional honesty, inhabited by superbly realized characters, riotously funny and wonderfully suspenseful, Crooked Little Heart is Anne Lamott writing at the height of her considerable powers. show less
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Member Reviews
I loved Lamott's [Bird by Bird] and her non-fiction titles on faith. So, I decided to give one of her novels a try. Lamott seems more at home in the world of non-fiction than she did in this fiction work. Metaphors and similes choked the narrative to the point of distraction. And she seemed interested in stretching the plot points out to lengthen the book. Overall, not impressed enough to keep the book in my library. I won't quit reading Lamott, but I will likely stick to the non-fiction.
After a slow start, I gradually fell in like with the writing style and people in this coming-of-age novel. I say "in like" because I have discovered I'm not overly partial to character-driven novels. Still, Lamott writes gorgeous descriptive sentences and uses lovely similes. Her grasp on the dynamics of a blended family and the social pressures on modern teenage girls seems effortless and without artifice.
A nice piece of work and well worth reading.
A nice piece of work and well worth reading.
I felt the author's point was to move slowly through the life of a family with their daughter, a budding tennis player. There is a tension which hovers as opposed to gripping your throat leaving you gasping for air. However; the tension remains, it is very present or is it? You are left questioning to the very end.
Maybe it was just me. I have liked all of the Lamott essays I've read and even her other fiction. I just couldn't get into this one. I invoked my 50 page rule. If I couldn't get into it, I don't make myself read the rest.
Pretty weak writing; I love Lamott's non-fiction, this was disappointing
Signed
6-98
For Clare
With all good wishes
6-98
For Clare
With all good wishes
Signed
6-98
For Clare
With all good wishes
6-98
For Clare
With all good wishes
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Author Information
39+ Works 32,515 Members
Anne Lamott was born on April 10, 1954 in San Francisco, California. She began writing when she returned to California after spending two years at Goucher College, but her early efforts, mostly short stories, met with little success. The turning point in her writing came with a family crisis, when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer. She show more wrote a series of short pieces about the traumatic effect that serious illness has on a family. These pieces were published, and they eventually became the basis of her first novel, Hard Laughter, published in 1980. During the 1980s, she wrote three additional novels, Rosie, Joe Jones and All New People. In 1989, her life took another turn when her son was born. Her next book, published in 1993, was a non-fiction effort called Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. She wrote ironically, but candidly, about her struggles to adjust to her new role as a mother and a single parent, and her experiences with everything from sleep deprivation to financial and emotional uncertainty to concerns about what she would tell her son when he was old enough to ask about his absent father. Operating Instructions proved to be even more successful than her novels, and led to interviews on network news programs and a regular spot on National Public Radio. Her other works include Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Crooked Little Heart; Blue Shoe, Imperfect Birds, and Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son. Her title Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Her title Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair and Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace also made The New York Times Best Seller List. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Awards and Honors
Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Crooked Little Heart
- Original publication date
- 2011
- People/Characters
- Rosie Ferguson
- Epigraph
- Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt--marvrellous error!--
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures
--Antonio Macha... (show all)do, from "Times Alone" - Dedication
- This one is for the Smiths, Bill, Emmy, Nell, Luisa, and Sam, and for Leroy Lounibos.
- First words
- Rosie and her friends were blooming like spring, budding, lithe, agile as cats.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)For as long as she could, Elizabeth strained to hear the two together, the antiphony of tune and ocean, until she had to stop for a moment and close her eyes with the sudden feeling that something that had dropped was rising on its own.
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Statistics
- Members
- 977
- Popularity
- 26,837
- Reviews
- 11
- Rating
- (3.42)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 12
- ASINs
- 5
