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    The Memory Room: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Memory Room: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Memory Room: A Novel
    Ebook467 pages4 hours

    The Memory Room: A Novel

    By Mary Rakow

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “A California woman fights to recover from resurfaced memories of childhood abuse . . . powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful.” —Kirkus Reviews
     
    The novel opens with Barbara, who, after remembering incidents of torture at the hands of her father, has quite literally broken down. Found inside a disabled elevator, she is no longer able to function with her new consciousness of these memories—those which are so resistant to understanding. Confronted with this knowledge of evil, she must begin the painful process of remembering and reconstructing a new whole self.
     
    Helping Barbara to navigate her grief and her memories are her therapist, the Psalms, and most of all, the words of Paul Celan. Paul Celan: 1920-1970, Poet. An eastern European holocaust survivor who wrote haunting poems about the darker spiritual trials of life and relationships that exhibit a compact style that fuses broken words and chopped syntax to produce a stark musicality.
     
    This is a novel about a woman who goes to hell and back. It’s a story that affirms the resilience of the human spirit and the healing power of love and faith.
     
    “The Memory Room marks the rarest of occurrences—the debut of a literary master.” —Janet Fitch, #1 national bestselling author of White Oleander
     
    “With subtlety, restraint and an extraordinary eye for detail, Rakow has constructed a breathtaking debut that avoids the clichés of abuse narratives as it tests the boundaries of prose and poetry.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 1, 2015
    ISBN9781619026940
    Unavailable
    The Memory Room: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Memory Room

    4/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is one amazing book. It's surprising, sensitive, mysterious, confusing, makes no sense but yet it does.
      Its writing style is everything I hate in a book - the premise of the book is not stated up front, it's like a murder mystery, and it's poetic.
      However, all these contradictions and contrasts are what make this such a great book.

      The story is about a woman called Barbara who was the victim of horrendous abuse as a child at the hands of her father. This story is about her journey,
      with the help of a counsellor, from a life of isolation and terror to one of healing towards her eventual successful assimilation back into society.

      The chapters are short. The early chapters are consistently short which gives the reader a sense of Barbara's difficulty in dealing with the world around her.
      Toward the end of the book there are more longer chapters which show a distinct growth in Barbara's healing process.

      This book tugged at my heart strings very strongly. I think the reason for this was that Mary Rakow masterfully only gave the reader snippets of what Barbara's
      childhood involved which encouraged the reader to keep reading to see what happens next. I found myself both rooting for Barbara to get well as well as hoping
      she would take her time - I didn't want to say goodbye to this strong yet fragile woman whom I had come to know and love as closely as though she was my own
      friend or family.

      This book will forever have a special place in my heart. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a book with a difference and lots of
      great twists and turns.

      5 stars.
    • 3/5
      enjoyed the prose writing style - novel is about a woman's current life while trying to cope with the past, mostly her childhood. read this years ago, so don't remember it clearly now.