Rating: 
Summary: What did I miss?
Review: I read the book, and I've read these reviews. I must have missed something. I didn't find the women in this book particularly interesting or strong or anything. My favorite character was Delia's friend Rosemary, but I didn't get to spend much time with her. I didn't like any of Delia's girls. I kept waiting for one of them to do something interesting or redeem themselves and their mother, but it just didn't happen. I wasn't even shocked when Dede erupted like a volcano. It had been coming all through the book. Oh, well. I'm going to read "Bastard out of Carolina" and see if Allison's benchmark story lives up to all the raves reviews. END
Rating: 
Summary: Cavedweller is a story about strong women and mother love.
Review: Cavedweller is a wonderful story about friendship amongst strong women and mother love. Allison is a gripping storyteller as she has proven most notably in Bastard Out of Carolina. This book is different, and I am glad. Allison went to the depths of her soul to write Bastard. I can only imagine a person would have the strength to write one book of that nature in a life time. (I am not sure I would have the strength to read another Bastard!) Cavedweller is about a mother reclaiming her children, and her children reclaiming their mother. Strong women are in abundance, and the importance of women friends is well noted.
Rating:
Summary: AIN'T NO BASTARD, BUT IT'S GOOD
Review: BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA was one of my most powerful reading experiences of the 90s. Allison's new book does not belong in that pantheon, although it is a worthwhile read. The story takes place in somewhat familiar territory (the whiskey-sloshed South), but the writing itself is far removed from the sparse poetry of BASTARD. Here the sentences are high-flown and sometimes overly grand. Still, there is a great emotional pull to these characters, especially at the start and the finish of the novel. It's nice to find redemption in a novel by Dorothy Allison--especially when the most were expecting is escape.
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Review: Allison is a good story teller, and she has a gift for taking the reader to difficult places - mourning, abuse, fear - and bringing them back unharmed. I picked up this book because she had taken on the subject of redemption, and I was interested to see her gritty take on it. There were parts of the book that really worked. For example, her characters are believable, interesting, and worth hearing about. She used an interesting fourth person voice which allowed different characters to narrate. But it also allowed Allison to wax on about the meaning behind everything. Was this in case we missed the easy to follow symbolism? (Cissy experiencing her mother's feelings while exploring /nearly dying in a deep dark cave - only to "birth" herself - but unable to map the passage. By the end of the book, I was tired of hearing all the hidden meanings about the ridiculously titled rock album the mother had sang on - "diamonds and dirt.") The reason I read fiction is because I want to be told a story. Not the meaning. If this is the first book you are considering buying of Dorothy Allison's, I would recommend you start with "Bastard out of Carolina." Now that was a great story.
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as Bastard out of Carolina, but worth reading.
Review: After reading Bastard out of Carolina, I was a little disappointed. A lot of parts I found difficult to relate to and I couldn't get attached to any of the main characters. Still worth reading, though.
Rating: 
Summary: Dorothy Allison has written her best work yet.
Review: Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller is a hefty novel, Dickensian in scope and complexity of narrative. And yet, it is at the same time an intensely intimate look at the minute aspects of life, the memory of a beloved's face, the eye roll of a rebellious adolescent, forgiveness in the touch of a hand to a weary shoulder. Allison somehow reaches down into the dark secrets of her characters souls and, like some psychic surgeon, pulls out bits of flesh and blood and bone, leaving behind no mark that says she was there. These characters of perfect and perfected, whole and real. We can hear them, smell them, taste the salt that gathers on their necks, and we lose ourselves in the dream of their lives as grand and awful, as dark and comforting, as byzantine and beautiful as the caves for which the novel is named. Like Bastard out of Carolina, the voice is soft and Southern, yet fierce and sure. And where Bastard was a book about sin and the revenge of healing, Cavedweller is a story, a set of stories, really, about the redemptive force of love and forgiveness. It must mark an evolutionary advance in Allison's own heart, and the power of her narrative pulls us up there with her. This is a novel any serious reader will want to devour, like a big warm loaf of homemade bread, in great delicious hunks that leave one full and satisfied, and yet sorry when the last crumb has been fingered from the plate. Don't miss it. --Asa DeMatteo
Rating:
Summary: I Liked It
Review: I like it a lot. It doesn't have the same impact as "Bastard Out of Carolina" (the author's first novel - a modern classic), but it is thoroughly enjoyable. There are still elements that can be compared to "My Fractured Life" of the rockstar life style and the survival of abuse, but different elements than those that make "Bastard Out of Carolina" similar to "My Fractured Life." Still a great book and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: DISARMING CANDOR AND LYRICAL PROSE
Review:
Echoing the voices and revisiting the region of her starkly splendid debut novel, Bastard Out Of Carolina, Dorothy Allison sets her story of family, friendship, and redemption, Cavedweller, in rural Cayro, Georgia. This community with its myopic mores and entrenched culture is as much a part of her tale as the gritty, determined women who call it home.
With disarming candor and often lyrical prose Ms. Allison relates the story of Delia Byrd, who fled Cayro for Los Angeles a decade ago, running from an abusive husband, Clint Windsor, and leaving behind two baby daughters. Delia became the whiskey-voiced, whiskey dependent lead singer for a rock group called "Mud Dogs." When her second husband, guitarist for the group and father of her third daughter, Cissy, dies in a fiery motorcycle crash, Delia packs a few belongings plus her protesting daughter into an enfeebled Datsun and heads for home. Determined to stay sober and reunite her family, she drives cross-country "as if her sanity depended on it."
There are no welcome home signs in Cayro. Recognizing Delia, a diner cook announces, "You that bitch ran off and left her babies......don't think people don't remember....You the kind we remember." Her return is greeted with even less charity by the congregation of the Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, and Scripture quoting Grandma Windsor who has raised Delia's other two daughters: Amanda, 15, a hellfire and damnation religious zealot, and Dede, 12, a caustic cigarette smoking nymphet. Only M.T., "a big woman, muscular under soft pads of flesh" offers succor to "her lost best friend and the daughter at her side."
Desperate to reclaim her girls, Delia strikes a bargain with the cancer stricken Clint - she will care for him until his death in return for custody of their daughters. Thus, dysfunctional as it may be, they are a family again as Delia works herself into exhaustion, Amanda prays, Dede scorns, and Cissy forms a tenuous rapprochement with the dying man.
While the first half of this deftly crafted narrative focuses on Delia as she battles guilt, recrimination, poverty, and the urge to drink, the second portion belongs to Cissy. It is her coming-of-age tale, rendered with compassion and eloquence. Doubtless there will be parallels drawn between Cissy and Harper Lee's "Scout" in To Kill A Mockingbird. Cissy does not suffer by comparison. Viewing the world with a probative eye she searches hungrily for her identity.
When Cissy is introduced to the mysteries and challenges of spelunking, it is within the black recesses of Little Mouth cave that the young insomniac finds rest and a modicum of peace. "Looking up into the rock ceiling...she imagined she could hear gospel music in the darkness just outside of the light's little circle....she found herself thinking about God, the God who stacked rock on rock and watched after fatherless girls."
Ms. Allison draws her characters forcefully, with telling detail, etching them upon the reader's consciousness. Her description of Clint's final moments is surely one of the most memorable scenes in contemporary literature. Few describe a redneck with the hair trigger accuracy of this author, or more truly limn the evangelistic fervor of southern fundamentalists. Her depiction of enduring friendship, non-judgmental and patient, is tribute to both Ms. Allison's estimable skill as a wordsmith, and the generosity of the human heart.
Rather than the unrelenting cycle of poverty and oppression described in some of Ms. Allison's previous work, this novel ends on a hopeful note. "I wanted to write about people who could change," Ms. Allison has said. "You can create redemption for yourself." Cavedweller is unforgettable affirmation of her belief.
- Gail Cooke
Rating:
Summary: Everyone thinks he knows zucchini
Review: The cavedweller of the story is the youngest daughter of Delia Byrd, Cissy. It comes to pass that Cissy sleeps bettter in caves than above ground. Having suffered an injury to one of her eyes as a child she is bothered by light anyhow, and does not fear the darkness. She feels safer below ground than in other circumstances. In the small town in Georgia to which her mother flees, after stopping drinking and the career as a singer she attained on the west coast, there are many people available to make Cissy feel uncomfortable. There is her mother's husband who is dying a difficult death. Actually she comes to feel something like a sort of love for Clint, something no one else feels at the time of his dying. There are her two sisters, Amanda and Dede, reunited with their mother, trying to get through their teen years and challenging the younger girl, and there are the people in the school and the town who ask Cissy about the lives of rock and roll stars. It takes over four hundred pages for Cissy to learn to understand and to love her mother again. It takes that length for her to accept the death of her own father, Randall. Randall Pritchard died when he flew off the road on his motorcycle. Cissy told her mother, Delia, she had killed him. Delia had abandoned her babies and spent most of the decade drunk. Delia and Cissy left Venice Beach to go to Cayro, Georgia. In Delia's career in music, the music had been made from the core of her. That life had been like a dream. Delia started to run to fight off the desire to drink. She had insomnia. She set up a workshop in which to sand and restore furniture. She listened to talk show radio while she worked and she got mad she told Cissy. Read on. I have read this author's books before now, and this is the best one.
Rating:
Summary: Redemption and Forgiveness Beautifully Wrought
Review: This is a lovely story written by a master of words. Early on she wrote, "They said to hear Delia Byrd sing on stage was like hearing your heart break in a whole new key." Words such as those make the price of the book worth it to me by themselves.
The story is multi-layered and at times a bit of work but well worth the effort. The book is a study of the evolution of love, friendship, forgiveness and redemption, all the while reminding us that until we forgive ourselves, we can never be forgiven.
Dorothy Allison would lead us to believe that you can go home again - perhaps the most painful revelation when you get there
will be not that everything is different but rather that nothing has changed.
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