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Review:
Anyone would have described teen-aged Karen's family as the perfect American household, but the images of a fine home and loving parents were hollow, covering a dark core of abuse and neglect. Author Regina Krummel, demonstrating the same power that charged Looking Good, her first novel dealing with emotionally wounded youth, brings us the first-person story of young Karen and her desperate search for safe haven in a world of users and abusers.
Touched by Krummel's characteristic poignance and insight, Karen's memoir describes her tragic journey, first sexually victimized by her father, a supposedly upstanding military officer, betrayed by her alcoholic mother, then abused by a wealthy, older ma n, Frank, who plucks her from a Manhattan teen shelter only to leave her physically and mentally battered. Her life in tatters, Karen returns to what she sees as the source of her troubles, her father, and kills him. Only years later in the cold womb of p rison can Karen review the sad arc of her life and begin the task of healing and renewal.
Both affecting and informed, every young person can find some part of him - or herself in Liquor to Casket. As a cautionary tale or a basis for lessons and discussions, Liquor to Casket deserves a place in your school library, and in Health Education and English classrooms.
Lauded by respected reviewers!
"...a compelling and sometimes unsettling novel with many
revelations on a true-to-life scale. The social and cultural
nuances give it a power that escalates as the story unfolds. An
intricate and psychological journey for the reader." Gwen
Costa, Ashley Books
"Liquor to Casket...penetrates beyond the clichés of twelve step programs to a darkness of the heart that our society is rarely willing to confront...There is tremendous power in the pages that lead up to the climax..." Edwin J. Terjirian, Ph.D.
"Dostoyevsky's compassionate descriptions of the degraded and humiliated come to mind in Regina P. Krummel's first-person narrative of an American girl who is forced to grow up too quickly in a fragmented and cynical world...Liquor to Casket will shock th e complacent with its unrelenting portrait of the Reagan era's 'nuclear' family." Maggie Jaffe, author of Continuous Performance and co-author of 1492: What Is It Like To Be Discovered
On Regina P. Krummel's first novel, Looking Good:
"...a relentless, disturbing account..." --Publisher's
Weekly
"...hypnotic reading." --Booklist
"...offers a message...too often ignored in today's
society." --UPI
About the author
Regina P. Krummel is a professor at Queens College, City
University of New York. Her extensive work with troubled young
people at the North Shore University Hospital in Long Island, New
York as a poetry-therapist served as the basis for her first
full-len gth novel, as well as for Liquor to Casket.
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