Tully - Hardcover

Simons, Paullina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312110839 ISBN 13: 9780312110833

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

Synopsis

Five young Midwestern women and men struggle to find their paths in the wake of a shared and life-altering tragedy

About this title

About the Author:

Paullina Simons was born in Leningrad in 1963. As a child she emigrated to Queens, New York, and attended colleges in Long Island. Then she moved to England and attended Essex University, before returning to America. She lives in New York with her husband and children.

From Publishers Weekly:

Esteemed editor Bob Wyatt's initial book for his new imprint, this much ballyhooed first novel is not notable for literary merit but for the melodramatic story it tells. Set during the last two decades in Topeka, Kans., and centering on a tough kid named Tully who oddly resembles skater Tonya Harding in looks and deportment, the narrative chronicles Tully's wild struggle against her lower-class origins, circumstances and fate (not to mention her genes) without any redeeming growth or insights achieved by any of the central characters until at the end Tully belatedly realizes the error of her ways. It's an emotionally crude coming-of-age story in which Tully, her two best girlfriends and the two men she loves never seem to rise above adolescent emotions and behavior. The story has the no-holds-barred, cranked-out quality of 19th-century penny novels, with an abundance of cheap thrills and hair-raising scenes. We tag along as Tully endures abandonment, incest, abortion, child and spousal abuse, passion, promiscuity, marriage, motherhood, infidelity, terrible nightmares, midnight graveyard scenes, tortured partings with lovers and more. The most interesting character is the villain, Hedda Makker, Tully's mother, whose chief pleasure in life is beating the living daylights out of Tully. Though billed as "a big Russian novel" about mothers and daughters, much of the narrative has a breathless, awkward oral texture, although long patches of exposition have an evenness and clarity that suggest Simons's potential. Despite all the wailing, sighing and bloodletting--or perhaps because of it--the story is engrossing as tabloid features often are: not believeable or artful, but fascinating in a macabre way. 165,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC selection .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0312110839
• ISBN 13: 9780312110833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 594