Wire Mesh Mothers

Rating:
Summary: Powerful, Frightening Road Trip
Review: Elizabeth Massie's Wire Mesh Mothers is a rarity indeed. It presents its reader with great, solid writing. Massie has a great style of her own and uses it fully to her advantage in this book. Unfortunately, the plot lacks credibility. It's hard to believe anything that happens in this book.

Here, we have a teacher who kidnaps one of her students because she wants to take her out of her home, where she is being abused by her father and mother. But they are both kidnapped by a troubled teen and they embark on a raod trip that will bring them from cold Virginia to warm Texas. The trip will be a real nightmare for all three women; darkness abounds and real dark twists of fate awaits them at every fork in the road.

The story in itself is marginally entertaining. But every time you think the story will drive away from the cliches of the road movie-type genre, the story takes a swerve and embraces those cliches with open arms. And these three women are so unrealistically unlucky and their lives are so full of demons that after a while, you just stop believing in their problems and troubled lives. I mean, how much problems can a person suffer through?

A story like this needs to leave the reader enthralled and needs to veer away from the cliches. Wire Mesh Mothers does nothing like that. If there is anything that it does do is show that Massie is a very good, solid writer. But that's pretty much it.

Rating:
Summary: Ride to Terror!
Review: Great novel about a terrifying kidnapping and a woman's ordeal in learning not only to survive but to gain something from the situation. Realistic plot, heart-pounding scenes running one into another, and characters I could understand and care about, especially Mistie. I read it in two nights; couldn't put it down! Check it out!

Rating:
Summary: Tale of terror from a teacher's, and students', POVs.
Review: It must be scary to be a teacher, and this book explores one scenario that would make any educator shiver and squirm. Well-written and fast-paced, this book was worth the time and the money. I've known kids like Mistie, and was rooting for her throughout the ordeal. In spite of the horror, there was an underlying sympathy for all three main characters in the book. Now, where are they keeping Massie's next novel? I'm more than ready.

Rating:
Summary: Become enmeshed
Review: Kate McDolen is a grade school teacher in the town of Pippins, Virginia. One fateful day she finally gets fed up with the worst kid in the school and crosses the line in dealing with him. Facing the almost certain loss of her job and probably legal action as well, she decides to run. She isn't that happy with her life, anyway. She takes with her an eight year-old girl named Mistie, whom everybody knows is being abused at home. Kate knows people, and plans to take Mistie someplace far away where she can grow up safely.

It isn't the most well thought out plan, and control is taken out of Kate's hands almost immediately anyway by a bitter, cruel teenaged girl named Tony. Tony is running also - from a botched convenience store holdup and also from her deadbeat mother and pathetic home life. She intends to go to Texas where her wealthy, connected father can give her the life she feels she deserves. Kate's road trip to salvation suddenly takes a sharp u-turn into hell.

While a lesser writer would have piled on horror after horror out of pure sadism, Massie provides a story in which there is much cruelty, but never any without reason. Intense but not to gratuitous excess, it rises above the crop of horror novels that seek only to disgust the reader. She also keeps her antagonist from becoming a cartoon villain by telling one third of the story from her perspective. Tony commits horrific acts and while you certainly never like her, you actually do feel for her. She is a product of her environment as much as anyone else, and she has intriguing psychological motivations for her behavior. This, too, sets it apart from more common works.

This is a fast-paced, compulsively readable thriller about life on the dark side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Rating:
Summary: One Fine Book
Review: Kate McDolen, severely depressed by an unhappy home life and faltering teaching career, seeks salvation in what her troubled mind tells her is a selfless act. When Kate encounters second grader Mistie Dawn Henderson, an obvious victim of child abuse, she kidnaps her, vowing to save the child from further abuse.

But fate intervenes as she initiates her poorly conceived plan. Kate and her young charge are taken hostage by "Tony," a bitter teenage girl whose own frustrations have led her to rob a local gas station at gunpoint. Thus is formed a strange family unit consisting of the teacher and the two children, all victims of varying forms of abuse. Ostensibly traveling to Texas so that Tony can be reunited with her absentee father, the trio begins a journey that will lead them to face their destinies.

Written with energy, gravity and grace, Wire Mesh Mothers is superior work from a superior stylist. Told from the rotating viewpoints of the three scarred heroines, it is a grim tale of despair and redemption, a trek through a wasteland of abuse and shattered lives. Although the initial theme seems to be that no good deed goes unpunished, Massie's overriding messages of hope, redemption and the importance of family ultimately emerge as the narrative moves towards its riveting and moving finale.

Wire Mesh Mothers is one of the most absorbing novels I've read in a long time, both for the story it tells and for its objective consideration of the effects of almost overwhelming social problems. At heart a thriller, it's also a compassionate report from America's heartland, populated by realistic characters who run a gamut of emotions, characters who are by turns sad, courageous, funny, pathetic and monstrous. Propelled by Massie's precise and insightful prose, ear for dialogue, knack for telling detail, and penchant for risk taking, the narrative will overwhelm you if you let it, so powerful is the story at its center. At times one might conclude that the author is telling us that "Life is hard, then you die." Indeed, Massie suggests that to be a woman in America is to endure special burdens. Yet she also suggests that in the bleakness there is hope, as long as we continue to reach out to one another.

Rating:
Summary: Tale of terror from a teacher's, and students', POVs.
Review: Wire Mesh Mothers is yet another novel (in a recent string of novels) that is entirely mislabeled under the banner of "horror". Nothing could be further from the truth where this one is concerned.

There is absolutely no sympathy to be had for the main character of Kate McDolan. She's an unhappy, spoiled upper-class little brat. She is trapped in a loveless marriage of her own creation. She is despondent over her inability to relate with her own son and resented as a teacher by the small town yokels.

She opts to one day "conveniently kidnap" the nightgown-wearing, one-dimensional-stereotypical-loner/weirdo, Mistie Henderson.

Kate's preposterous intent is to steal herself and Mistie, relocate to Canada and live happily ever after with her hippie friends from college. A better life for both of them is her ultimate vision. The preposterous turns to the ludicrous when their departure is ruined before it even begins. Kate is carjacked by a 15 year old small town-Cops reject-gangsta-wanna-be named Tony (a.k.a. Angela.)

I found it incredibly difficult to fathom that a fit, 38 year old teacher could not have overpowered a scrawny 15 year old kid ONCE throughout this entire story. Kate comes out of this ordeal with more damage to herself that is reasonably possible.

Tony (Angela) herself annoyingly shifts personas throughout the novel. She's a grade school drop-out amazed at the interior of a no-tell motel one moment... a first rate actress finagling a ride out of ridiculously cardboard-cutout (read: doofus) secondary characters the next...all generously combined with a cold, methodical foul-mouthed murderess every other moment of the story.

The story stops dead in the final pages, without any sort of concrete resolution. A world of entertaining novels awaits you out there... regrettably "Wire Mesh Mothers" is not one of them.

Rating:
Summary: hard edged thriller well worth the time!
Review: Wire Mesh Mothers might not be typical "horror" as suggested by several other reviewers, but then horror comes in many forms, not only ghosts or vampires. They come in the form of fears, weaknesses, anger, and missteps in life. Maybe it should have been labeled a thiller instead, but thrillers can be horror stories, too. The characters in Wire Mesh Mothers are realistic in their motives and in the circumstances those motives sweep them into as the story progresses. One reviewer seemed off-put that Kate was spoiled and rich. That seemed to me to be the point of her character from the outset, and the story brought her through some terrifying and painful moments that taught her about her own shallowness and her own, at long last, innate strength to change. I recommend this book for its fast-paced tale of power struggles and human flaws, as well as for its finely crafted prose. I've read two other Massie novels and even though my favorite remains Welcome Back to the Night, this one ranks up there.