Description:
Like Normal People is the story of Ella Rose and her family, a blue-collar clan living in Los Angeles. Ella is old and her mind is going. Ella's youngest daughter, Vivien, is exhausted and harried, full of concerns about her own family. Her oldest girl, Lena, is developmentally disabled and lives in a residential home called Panorama City. As the novel begins, Lena sets her room on fire and almost gets kicked out. When Ella drives over to try to resolve the situation, she takes her granddaughter with her, and while her back is turned Lena and the child take off. For a brief afternoon they are fugitives, riding the Los Angeles bus system, shoplifting--they call it "borrowing"--from drugstores, fantasizing about the house they want to live in on the edge of the sea. In her first novel, Karen E. Bender skillfully renders mood with a few salient details. Here Ella and her husband Lou are depicted in flashback, moving to Los Angeles as newlyweds: "They began armed with a crooked, raw arrogance. Unpracticed, Ella copied Lou. It made them sleepless, talkative. She, too, threw trash out the car window, and the rhythm of her speech began to match his." Yet her writing can also fall into short, laboring metaphors that never quite gel: "Ella was waiting to understand the emotion within her, for her heart was restless, trying hard to beat with a feeling that she did not yet understand." Like unskilled actors who disrupt a film, such rough sentences pull us away from the lives Bender has created. --Emily White
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