Author: Reynolds Price
Title: Kate Vaiden
Publication Info: Scribner (1986)
ISBN: 0689117876
Summary/Review: This story set in rural North Carolina and later in Norfolk, Virginia is told from the perspective as a memoir titular character. Kate’s parents die in a murder-suicide leaving Kate to be raised by relatives and to get involve in self-destructive sexual relationships at a young age. The tone of the book is one of distance and indifference, perhaps appropriate to a narrator who has shut her self off from the world, but at the same time it is difficult to read a story that the narrator seems uninterested in telling. What could be a good story of an interior struggle comes off as dull and unconvincing.
Recommended Books: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Rating: *1/2
