What readers are saying about Patient Women:
Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!
There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. Patient Women is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by Patient Women. WOW!!! Unforgettable!
—Meg Tuite
If you are in any type of recovery program, you will
recognize the characters in this book as people you know. I read the erudite
blurbs on the back, which would scare away most of the people I know [who]
would find it a fascinating and compelling read. It may be a 'literary novel',
but it reads like real life, reads like the lives of the people I know.
Recovery friends, we are in this book! Great job award goes to the author!
—Yoby Henthorn
Christ-figures are
likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on
a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a
whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical,
then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning
heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace.
—Anne
Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning
|
Nora,
born to a holocaust survivor mother, finds herself, at the threshold of
adolescence in “boring Queens.” Lying about her age, her first transgression
from her mother’s iron rule, she begins a series of ill-fated attempts to put
distance between herself and the familial web she so desperately wants to
disentangle from. She reels from one dysfunctional relationship to another,
druggies, pimps, losers, and masochists, searching for her lovable self. This
novel unfolds in a whirlwind that is sometimes her present. Be ready to have
your heart broken and then made whole.
—Bonny Finberg |
Larissa Shmailo’s newest work, Patient Women, is an
unflinching exploration of the lasting damage some people can inflict on their
children. Nora, Shmailo’s protagonist, evolves as she struggles to understand
and heal her own self-hatred and her on-going self-destructive choices.
Slogging one's way through a morass of denial and repression is a strong trope
throughout this raw, honest book. Nora is fiercely vulnerable and the
sympathetic hero of her own salvation. This novel is dark, but there is hope
that even the pain one lives through can cause one to create, finally, lasting
and beautiful art.
—Joani Reese
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