Lucky

Rating:
Summary: Sebold bares her soul!
Review: Having read Alice Sebold's debut novel, The Lovely Bones, I felt compelled to read her memoir. Glad I did. Lucky is one of the most thought provoking and poignant memoirs I have ever read. I admire this author's willingness to bare her soul and share the pain of having been a victim of a brutal rape to the world. I am deeply moved by how this woman's life changed after such a grueling experience. Her strength and bravery are truly admirable. I read this memoir in two sittings. I recommend everyone to read this wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Stark Naked
Review: Ms. Sebold provides a honest self-examination of her life after being raped. She describes in poignant detail how one traumatic event comes to define her life, setting her apart and affecting her relationships for decades.

Rating:
Summary: Just could not put the book down
Review: I absolutely loved the book, in fact I could not put it down. Alice Sebold gives the reader insight of the emotional struggles she dealt with after her rape, and she bravely shows her reading audience the raw emotions that surround a rape victim not for one week or two, but what the victims deal with for years after.
One in nine women who have been raped have the emotional strength to go through the system and get a conviction for their rapist. I hope this book will demonstrate that it can be done, and must be done to stop the violence against women.
Sebold tells a remarkable story that nailed me to my chair, and changed my attitudes and opened my eyes toward rape victims. I am so glad I had the opportunity to read it.

Rating:
Summary: A Painful Journey
Review: Sebold describes in vivid detail the painful journey she unwantedly took as the victim of a vicious rape on her college campus. I reccomend that you read this book before you read her book LOVELY BONES as it gives incredible insight into the backgroud of her fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful; good writing
Review: Sebold has not only told an amazing real-life story, but she has told it well. Her writing is excellent; unobtrusive, straight-forward, insightful.

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Summary: Wonderfully Written
Review: I think that Alice Sebold is a wonderful writter. I was just looking around on Amazon.com one day and it "recomended" 'The Lovely Bones' (I cant underline that) for me. I clicked on it and went to the "Look Inside" section. I was not really into reading all that much, but I read ALL of the book that was put on the internet and within a week purchased both of the books. 'The Lovely Bones' is wonderful, it keeps you interested. As well as 'Lucky'. I cant wait until she publishes another book. For anyone looking for a good read, these are 2 books you should get!!

Rating:
Summary: Deserves a Film Adaptation!
Review: I was inspired to read Lucky after being dazzled by the author's bestseller, The Lovely Bones. I'm glad I did. Alice is a gifted writer. Her keen self-awareness and ability to project her inner voice into written words is breathtaking. Alice has blessed the world by sharing the details of her rape and subsequent journey. I'm tempted to share my favorite parts of the book, but it would probably be a spoiler.

I perceive Alice as a hardened survivor, as are many who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Our instincts are sharpened, but the price we pay is always being on guard and rarely feeling safe. I'm glad Alice has found comfort and happiness with Glen David Gold.

Lucky would be an ideal made-for-TV movie. Alice's story is courageous and inspiring.

Bill Lee, author (Chinese Playground)

Rating:
Summary: Lucky
Review: The raw and brutal honesty in Sebold's true-life account of a rape and its legal and emotional consequences is horrifying, disturbing, and altogether difficult to stomach. She is an 18-year-old college freshman in Syracuse, New York, when a man assaults her on a dark road and rapes her. During the aftermath of the attack, Sebold's family members try to comfort her and support her desire to prosecute, but they barely understand. Often Sebold is the most courageous one of all. In an increasingly dangerous succession of events, she turns to alcohol, drugs, and unhealthy relationships to cope with the stigma rape survivors bear. Eventually, the same kind of strength that carried her through the attack and years of the trial resurfaces, and she becomes successful and happy and, as her work attests, an excellent writer as well. This book will be painful, and perhaps helpful, to other rape survivors.

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Summary: After Great Pain A Stunted Memoir Comes
Review: Americans can't get enough of Crime TV so American readers may like this book. It delivers bludgeoning description - graphic, straight and true - individualizing the experience of a torture at once the most personal and pervasive, but assuring us the good guys win. Delivered without the annoyance or bother of challenging analysis, and without the awkward courtesy of informed contemporary assistance to others similarly situated, the book asks nothing but that we read on --and most will not help but do so. The paperback will be popular, and no doubt, the made for TV movie.

Americans will like a book about an alienated and alienating teen who suffers and survives, all the while sustaining a wide eyed belief she has gone it alone, triumphed over the odds, and by golly, you could too if you would just give the legal system a go. Never mind that this rape survivor finds a note in her file fifteen years later that betrays a difficult truth: Despite her demographics the police do not believe her any more than a thousand other "lucky" victims they have already seen, will continue to see, and see to this day. We wait for the author to divine the appalling significance of this note, to put aside the emerging potboiler, sniff the air, and seriously reconnoiter. We wait in vain. Breathtakingly naïve, the memoir offers us the author's twenty year head start on contemporary adulation of police as heroic.

Unfortunately, the odor of disbelief is plain to readers from the outset. It scents the air in every interaction and institution with which the author comes in contact. It steams from her very own pages, but Sebold is the last to know. Even now she does not seem to detect the stench as it wafts from police to an incredulous parent's question, is deodorized by a patient feminist attorney's empathy, suspended by a waif's unassuming ministrations, or ramped up by a slimeball defense attorney's assaults.

This undetected fragrance would be bittersweet for readers - she is, after all, only a kid at the time - if only the intervening decade or two and the file information would give the grown up author pause. If it seems to readers that the passage of time and the passing of this file will call for a new and more sophisticated perspective, well, for Sebold, things remain just what they seemed. Reflection on those times, on our own, and on the hard work that makes change possible -- as per Blumenfeld's Revenge, or Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted? No such complications attend this work.

But it is a memoir, and so we want to hear her out. If the author is fond of the particular over the pattern, where does she convey why this particular memoir is necessary or just? Beyond personal catharsis, beyond her tedious hair-trigger competitive instinct and unseemly love of celebrity, what justifies this tell-all? What moral vision does this book offer that justifies, for instance, the vivisection too hastily inflicted on her parents and sister in these pages? A rape survivor does not owe us philosophy, but a memoir has to try.

What are her motives for writing? What sophisticated view of justice does Sebold offer to balance the pain she delivers the hapless but heartrent young people she describes, real people who will read their offers of aid in paperback caricature twenty years later? What larger purpose recompenses their secrets and sexualities exposed? And most of all, what practical, social, or moral vision does she offer the other victims she "outs", with only the merest scrap of a name change? These are, after all real people whom she describes.

It is a testimony to Sebold's talent that she can tell a real story in a real way. But it is her moral failing to have done so recklessly, with so little concern for real others. Memoir is not fiction (at which the author is much better-see The Lovely Bones). And, this is not (yet) TV; these real people weep, and we are asked to watch in a posture of wry detachment, scorned for our squirming. Why?

And what are our motives for reading? I do not care, as some reviewers appear to do, whether or not her professors reek of voyeuristic curiosity. Theirs are not the only mixed motives in the sex crime to memoir nexus; why shouldn't a wounded teen find such people wise and diverting? But memoir is not fiction. Did she learn from these professors that it would be enough to relate a 20 year old tale "authentically", no matter the collateral damage? That it is sufficient to say that the world is divided into good, evil, and ridiculous? That cop lingo is romantic? That when evil befalls us naive determination, sharp wits, and an even sharper tongue will yield the good? That the world is full of suffering, but that it is one's own that counts the most? That even if it changes the way the world regards them, unique women should tough it out , tell the violating details, or have them told for them, and words will make things better? What, exactly, justifies this recklessness?

This memoir could have been important. It offers genuine, wrenching tales of upper middle class adolescent angst made exponentially more bitter by pointless tragedy, courageously described. But this is a harrowing passage from which the author has clearly not escaped. In this instance, adolescent angst is made more destructive by the author's continuing generosity in sharing it; even now she cannot keep a civil tongue in her head. Some may find this witty and arty and lively but I find it sad, empty, and hopeless. The honesty of Sebold's passages can break your heart, especially for the sense that the author is still lost in a time warp, with nothing to show for it but a drug problem, an enduring mean streak undisguised by considerable literary finesse, and a legal victory over, we hope to God, the right man.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling and emotional.............
Review: While reading this book I had to remind myself that it was in fact a true story. I could not put this book down, I had to know how Alice's life would turn out and how she would come through the terrible event which changed and affected her life forever. It was interesting to see how she not only changed but those around her changed as did their reactions to her.
An emotional and compelling read!