Rating: 
Summary: KEEPS YOU HOOKED!!!!
Review: What would you do if you were accused of a murder? What if you were accused of two murders? In the book Dolores Claiborne you go through the whole thinking process of what would I do? Stephen King draws you in from the first page! The setting is on an island called Little Tall. It starts out when the main character Dolores Claiborne a house wife, mother, and cleaning lady, is accused of killing Mrs. Vera Donavan, her long time employer. This isn't the first time people have called her a killer. Her husband was found dead and the people of Little Tall thought she did away with him. They didn't blame her; he always got drunk and would beat her. King takes you through every thought Dolores has and you feel like you're a part of her. I really liked this book! It was different than any other book I've read. Maybe I liked it because it was about a single mother doing what she has to do to protect her kids. I think the character Dolores Claiborne was very brave- she didn't care what people thought just as long as everything was okay at home. She would fight back when her husband would beat her. She also went straight to the police after the death of Vera Donavan. I think in this book Stephen King was trying to shock his audience. He accomplished this. The way he chose to tell the story had you hooked through the whole book.
Rating:
Summary: A King book That's Just About a Person. Awesome!
Review: When I started reading this book, I was bracing myself for a bad experience--I'd just finished Heart of Darkness by Conrad, which is three big chapters and boring as all get out... And this book is one big chapter. I was also wondering what the "supernatural" plot of this book was--Most other Stephen King books I'd heard the basic gist before I'd begun reading, and this one offered me no clue. I was pleasantly surprised to find, however, that this plot only had a hint of the supernatural, and that it was basically a picture a small-town poor woman grafted onto the character of a tiny Maine island. Normally "mundane" fiction bores me to tears, but this was one of the best books I've ever read. It had the superb characterization of any Stephen King novel--better, in fact, than most of the others--but without the bone-chilling plots that simultaneously sucked me in and repulsed me. I found myself reading the novel, thinking, "This sounds like Mom," and "This sounds like Grandma." I sincerely felt like I knew Dolores. That isn't to say that it's without supernatural elements. The supernatural bears very little relevance at all, but it helps build the mood of the novel and the tension of the climax. Instead of the setting and the characters being centered around a supernatural plot and hook that relates (and indeed, is a metaphor for) some aspect of human nature, it's merely a portrait of a fictitious but nonetheless realistic person, with the supernatural and mundane plot elements centered around a lifelike character and setting. One thing worth note, though, is that this is very light reading for a King novel--I finished less than twelve hours after I started. The brevity of it aside, this is a great book, and it really gives you a picture of what it's like in any small rural hamlet... with just a glimpse of something darker that will satiate any King fan's need to escape the mundane.
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