Tully by Paullina Simons - Softcover

Paullina-simons

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006490018 ISBN 13: 9780006490012

Publisher: Harpercollins Pub, Ltd., 1995

Synopsis

The astonishing debut novel from international number one bestselling author Paullina Simons, now beautifully repackaged Tully Makker is a tough young woman from the wrong side of the tracks and she is not always easy to like. But if Tully gives friendship and loyalty, she gives them for good, and she forms an enduring bond with Jennifer and Julie, schoolfriends from very different backgrounds. As they grow into the world of the seventies and eighties, the lives of the three best friends are changed forever by two young men, Robin and Jack, and a tragedy which engulfs them all. Against the odds, Tully emerges into young womanhood, marriage and a career. At last Tully Makker has life under control. And then life striles back in the most unexpected way of all...

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: Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0006490018
• ISBN 13: 9780006490012
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 656