A Heart of Stone

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite books of the year
Review: A HEART OF STONE - By Renate Dorrestein

Of all the novels I've read this year, this one I feel the most strongly about. As I read the book, I pictured it in my mind, as if I was watching a black and white film. The story is told in flashbacks, going from one time period to another. The flashes are brief. We'll get a scene here, another scene there. And through this technique, we slowly learn the story of Ellen Van Bemmel, and her memories of a family that appeared happy to the rest of the world, but in reality was full of turmoil and unhappiness.

Ellen had many happy memories of her father, sitting on his lap and laying her head on his chest, feeling safe. No one could hurt her when she was with Daddy. He had promised her. And she loved her mother. Her parents seemed so in love, at least from what she remembered. Her beautiful sister Billie (Sybille), her brothers Kester and little Carlos (Ellen's name for her brother) - they shared happy times, all those years ago. But a tragedy happens on her 12th birthday - it was such a horrible day, that Ellen has blocked most of it from her memory. It takes her decades to realize what really happened all those years ago. It takes her that long to come to terms with her past.

I highly recommend A Heart of Stone. The book held my attention the way a good mystery would. With details revealed in bits and pieces, I found myself wanting to spend all my time reading this book until I reached the end. A warning - this book is not for the faint of heart.

Rating:
Summary: Dutch psychological thriller
Review: A heart of stone
Dutch psychological thriller
Hard to say much about this book without giving too much away, but suffice to say that a previously 'perfect' family inexorably begins to fall apart with the birth of Ida, the fifth child, who suffers from strange and recurrent injuries. Is Mom, who seems to be slowly going mad, causing the troubles?
The story is told partly in retrospect when Ella, the third child, returns to her childhood home, turns the pages of a family album, and begins to remember?
Helluva good tale.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful but be warned
Review: Ellen Van Bemmel, the heroine of this tauntly written novel, looks back on a tragedy that happened in her family when she was 12 years old. The story, told in flashbacks, deals with a family that, like many families, looks happy and content to outsiders but is actually coming apart for the participants. The heroine's present day pregnancy adds texture to the character and is the impetus that makes the heroine deal with the tragedy that afflicted her family.
Well rounded as most of the characters are, I feel that the author could have done more with the father figure. I liked the sparsness of the language and recommed the book if you like stories of how people deal with the consequences of dysfunctional familes.

Rating:
Summary: Mentally Damaging
Review: Here is a story told through mental reflections of the past by a woman struggling with reality and skeletons in her family's closet.
The writing and telling of this story about post partum depression is outstanding. The words flow between the past and the present as Ellen tries to put her adult life together and deal with every day situations.
How can a loving mother be consumed with such a depression? How can a loving family handle living their lives and understand post partum depression? This book was an eye opener for me.
How can a very loving father and husband keep life going in a normal direction while he's dealing with this type of sad situation?
I recommend this book, but not to everyone. It's a deep and dark story with some very graphic scenes.

Rating:
Summary: Shocking and beautiful
Review: I have to admit that I was surprised by how much I _enjoyed_ this book. Ellen is certainly one of the richly textured main characters I can remember in recent fiction-- she never gives in to tragedy or melodrama, even as her mother descends into insanity following the birth of their family's youngest child. Each of the Van Bemmel children is given ample description and personality to make their loss all the more heart-wrenching.

This is one of those suspenseful books that starts in the aftermath and then takes the reader back through the events, leaving them to figure out why things happened the way they did. Dealing with insanity is a tough, tough job, but Dorrestein gives a chilling description of the mother's hallucinatory ravings about demonic possession, as well as an intimate picture of her husband's confusion at what is happening in his warm, close-knit family. Ellen, now in her thirties as she narrates, has trouble dealing with intimacy, as well as conflicting feelings about her own pregnancy, and as she slowly reveals her past like peeling the layers off an onion, one can hardly be surprised at her conflicted emotions.

Reading this book was something akin to driving past a car accident: I was horrified, but compelled to look. This book will haunt you long after you're finished.

Rating:
Summary: Kelsey Lin Book Review
Review: The Book A Heart of Stone by Renate Dorrestein is a beautifully written book. This book takes you into a chilling tale of murder, love, and betrayal. A family that was lost because of the fifth child and a mother's insanity due to post mortem distress. This riveting tale grabs the reader's attention and never let's go until the end of the book. It is just impossible to put down once you get into it. The book is mainly about the narrator and her journey to figure out what and why this had to happen to her family? And why her mother did it. This unsettling tale takes you through the good times and the bad times of the narrator's past and her present. The narrator who is a thirty five year old woman now is just finding out what really happened to her and her family as a young girl of twelve. It all came crashing down one night when she came home after storming off because she and her mother got into a fight. She walked in the door and her oldest sister and brother were lying on the table dead with bags wrapped around their heads. Their mother had strangled them. Her youngest brother was still alive but just barley. She was able to save him. He was her only relative left. Later he was adopted, she never knows what happened to him, and she doubts that if they passed on the street they wouldn't even recognize each other. When Ellen (narrator's name) moves back into her childhood home she begins to remember her past. As she looks into every room she start to remember the happier times of her life, and some not so happy. She starts to remember all the tales of her childhood, each memory replayed in scrupulous detail. The book switches from present day to her past. Every memory is replayed out of order so the reader has to place them. In the beginning she tells tales of the happy memories of her family like the good times. She also tells sad memories or memories of her and her mother fighting. Ellen tends to switch from present to past very quietly so in the very first pages it gets sort of confusing. Once the reader gets into the book no deeper than forty pages you just can't put it down. It is a very powerful tale of the perfect family coming to its untimely end. You begin to cherish what you have and feel for her family. Ellen is a very observant and she has a good heart. Sometimes she and her mother get into fights. Sometimes she gets into fights with her older siblings. When Ellen is older she must go through years and years of therapy, because of her traumatic childhood. Once she moves into her old home she finds herself playing the blame game like so many times before. She begins to recall that dreadful night and wonders many times why wasn't she killed? She finally has the strength to recall the night in full detail, everything that happened. At the end of the book she finally figures out that the only reason she isn't dead was because her mother forgot her. She had to many things to think about, it just slipped her mind. This powerful tale of a families tragic end is one of the best written books I have read. It leaves you speechles

Rating:
Summary: A good bizarre story
Review: This book had everything that one could want in a weird novel. The writing was beautiful as you feel as though you are one of the families' members. The charecters in this book were colorful, loving, and tragic all at the same time. But I do believe it was a bit bizarre, the way the mother's charecter was in the story and how it was very hearwrenching how the main charecter of the story, Ellen, told all of her experiences growing up with a loved family, until her mother goes a little over the edge after giving birth to her 5th child Ida. The mother goes insane and kills all the children except for Ellen, who was out walking the dog, and Carlos, who survived the medications she gave the children. It's a very sad, but moving story of how you see Ellen living her life from a teen to an adult, being traumatized from what her mother has done to the family, and how she relives everything in the story, and always feeling like it was her fault, like she should have been there to stop it. It's a moving and heartwrenching story that will always stay with me. I would recommend it if you are up for a book that might change your outlook on life and death.

Rating:
Summary: weird
Review: This is one weird book. But, it's also a good book. The storyline bounces back and forth between the present and the past and at times that is very unnerving. However, I found myself very engrossed by this story.

This is a story about post natal psychosis and the resemblance to the Andrea Yates story is downright eerie. At times the book disgusted me, much like Andrea Yates. Another similarity between the two stories was that while they may have disgusted you, it was tough to turn off the TV when the Texas murders were on just as it is tough to put this book down once you began.

Rating:
Summary: A well-plotted thriller through the mind of a survivor
Review: This novel is very well plotted, alternatively revealing and concealing the original family life ending in a catastrophic event, a twelve year old survivor's (the narrator's)response to the event, and the narrator, nearing forty, finally discovering a larger portion of the truth, finally ready to try getting on with her life.

The title refers figuratively to the heart of the narrator and to the family tombstone that names both parents and three children, with space on the bottom for the two surviving children - the narrator and her brother who was adopted into a new identity.

The strength of the novel is the author's ability to capture a child's sense of responsibility and confusion as life as she knows it falls apart around her - a destruction foreshadowed by the accidental scalding of the youngest child when the impending arrival of a baby is announced. With such family incidents good and bad, the author captures well the impending sense of doom of the child for whom it is formless. As readers, we learn early that the family died, early in the novel - the suspense is in the how, why, and by what trigger. The novel brings us slowly but surely to the answer ... the only answer that fits the family dynamics.

Why only 4 stars? The novel was one I could set down, could even go to bed without finishing - a poor sign for a thriller.

Rating:
Summary: A very moving novel!
Review: Written by Renate Dorrestein, one of Holland's best-loved and decorated novelists, this English translation of "A Heart of Stone" is a poignant, shocking, yet unflinching look at the effects of mental illness, it's devastating potential and it's aftermath.

In this novel, Ellen, the central character toggles from the present back into the past 25 years ago to tell the story of how tragedy struck her family. In the present, Ellen struggles to come to grips on the reality of what happened to her family, while just a strongly struggling NOT to remember it. In the past narration, Ellen describes her mother's descent into severe mental illness, and how everyone around the family seems to uncomfortable or unable to do realize what is happening to her children.

I can't say too much about the story without giving away the plot, but I have to tell you that I read it in just a few hours. Once I had been given a "teaser" about the family's past, I had to keep reading. This novel IS disturbing, and does not pull any punches in detailing the helplessness children feel when their parents fail them so hideously.

I can't imagine anyone who reads this novel not being moved enought to post a review about it. It's simply that powerful.