Sign in with Facebook
Loading...
74th out of 339 books
—
496 voters
Tenderness
Eighteen-year-old Eric has just been released from juvenile detention for murdering his parents. Now he's looking for tenderness--tenderness he finds in killing girls. Fifteen-year-old Lori has run away from home again. Emotionally naive and sexually precocious, she is also looking for tenderness--tenderness that she finds in Eric. Will Lori and Eric be each other's salvat...more
Paperback, 240 pages
Published
September 14th 2004
by Ember
(first published March 10th 1997)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
2,310)
Hmmm, what to say about this dark and dreary book? It is a young adult novel but it's extremely dark. It features an eighteen year old serial killer who has been imprisoned for the past three years for murdering his parents. Eric was also a suspect in the murder of several young girls but his guilt was never proven. He's due to be released very soon and the officer who knows he's a serial killer is determined to make sure he doesn't hurt another girl.
The other character is Lori, a fifteen year o...more
The other character is Lori, a fifteen year o...more
A lot of people felt that this book was (and I quote) "creepy and disturbing". It was a bit creepy, you know, that "a glimpse of a serial killers mind" thing. But I think Robert Cormier did a great job portraying eric the eighteen-year old that just got out of juvenile detention for killing his mother and stepfather. He's looking for "tenderness"----that which he finds in caressing and killing beautiful girls. Enter Lori. Lori has run away from home and is also looking for tenderness---which she...more
3 likes · like · see review
view 2 comments
Dec 19, 2011
Dana JH
added it
It was... okay. My BC teacher made it seem a lot better then it was i think. Yes, it was creepy, Yes, I felt bad for both Eric and Lori, and Yes it was very sad. But I feel like it could have been done a lot better. I get why they didn't have it at my library and I had to seek it out else where. Although the book had the plot line of awesomeness and the opportunity to become amazing I just don't think that it really worked. It was interesting though, because although Eric is a serial killer. He...more
Tenderness, by Robert Cormier, was close to the best book I've ever read. I enjoyed reading it because it was almost like reading the journal, and personal stories of multiple people. The book felt so real to me. The genres mixed between mystery, romance, and suspense. Every page felt like a deep, emotional poem. "Call my name from the grave of your rotting love. A hole in my mouth to match the hole in my heart, through which your love howls." I hear these words and think of sadness, maybe lonel...more
This was a good book; however, I would not read it again. I thought that the ending was really tragic because the girl drowned. The boy ends up getting charged for murder; however, he did not kill her. He is a killer but the girl that died was not his type. The detective that is watching him realizes that this is not his type of girl. Once he gets out of jail the detective starts to follow him even though he has done nothing wrong. When he tries to kill the girl the girl that he was with stops h...more
tenderness was both thrlling and freaky. lori has a fedish. if she sees something she wants, she has to have it. i liked how she would go after whomever she wanted and wasnt afraid. i felt like this book was meant to both amuse you and scare you. i think this book is for girls who like sick and twisted stories that combine love, lust, and murder. all throught the book it kept me on my toes. i never knew what lori was going to do next. it also kept you wondering what eric had in his mind when he...more
This novel was great and as i read along it leaves a scene in my head about a girl who has these weird fixations towards men and gets over by giving them very passionate kissing or for in search of some tenderness. A guy who is a serial killer, kills certain types of women after he makes out with them. After he was out of prison, he meets the girl in the middle of the story and she finds out that not only she knew him from her past but also has a fixation towards him. Then a their journey goes b...more
REQUIRED BOOK
This is the creepy story of Eric, a convicted serial killer, and Lori, a troubled teenager. The novel switches between the points of view throughout the book. Lori does a strange thing in that she gets fixated on someone and she will do anything to kiss them. She sees Eric on television and he becomes her next target. Eric emerges from juvenile prison after having killed a few girls and his parents. He's a psychopath. Both talk about how they look for tenderness in these disturbing...more
This is the creepy story of Eric, a convicted serial killer, and Lori, a troubled teenager. The novel switches between the points of view throughout the book. Lori does a strange thing in that she gets fixated on someone and she will do anything to kiss them. She sees Eric on television and he becomes her next target. Eric emerges from juvenile prison after having killed a few girls and his parents. He's a psychopath. Both talk about how they look for tenderness in these disturbing...more
This book was super creepy, but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It is told from two perspectives, Eric a serial killer who is in prison for killing his parents, and Lori a fifteen year old who sexually fixates on random men and uses her body to get what she wants. They meet in the middle of the novel after Eric is released from prison and they form a very interesting relationship. Lori is not Eric's "type" so he becomes friends with her instead of killing her. At the end of the nov...more
Most of my Psychtember reviews will be formatted differently than my standard reviews, to reflect the mental health theme. I've structured things as though the book is the patient and I'm giving it an assessment. Each axis is an aspect of the book that I'll give my thoughts on (characters, plot, etc.), and the validity score refers to how psychologically accurate I think the book is. Then I may list some other books that this one "shares symptoms with" (i.e. novels dealing with similar topics) a...more
Tenderness explores an interesting journey about an guy, who has an addiction with sexually assaulting young women and after slaughtering them. Meanwhile, there's a girl who, has extremely low self esteem and is basically a runaway. She tells her mom she goes to visit friends when in reality she goes and hitch hikes. They're both in need of some tenderness. Perhaps the tenderness and love was needed in their lives. This is because the girls mom and family is really dependent. The tennage boy st...more
CORMIER READING GROUPS
I feel gross saying that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. This is the story of a young girl who becomes obsessed with men and is always looking for "tenderness." Her family life is not great - her mother has been married multiple times and her current step-father attempts to come onto her. In response to her environment, or perhaps because of it, Lori has always used her body and sexuality as a way to get what she wants. She sees the picture of Erik, a serial killer, a...more
I feel gross saying that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. This is the story of a young girl who becomes obsessed with men and is always looking for "tenderness." Her family life is not great - her mother has been married multiple times and her current step-father attempts to come onto her. In response to her environment, or perhaps because of it, Lori has always used her body and sexuality as a way to get what she wants. She sees the picture of Erik, a serial killer, a...more
REQUIRED CATEGORY: CORMIER NOVEL
Cormier's novels are known for being dark, and despite the title, this is no exception. Fifteen-year-old Lori Cranston brings new meaning to the words looking for love, or in her words "tenderness", in all the wrong places. As she runs away from home, she crosses paths with a teenage serial killer recently released from jail, who is searching for "tenderness" as well, but not in the form of Lori. What happens when they finally do find each other in their search fo...more
Cormier's novels are known for being dark, and despite the title, this is no exception. Fifteen-year-old Lori Cranston brings new meaning to the words looking for love, or in her words "tenderness", in all the wrong places. As she runs away from home, she crosses paths with a teenage serial killer recently released from jail, who is searching for "tenderness" as well, but not in the form of Lori. What happens when they finally do find each other in their search fo...more
REQUIRED
Lori is a girl who will do just about whatever she needs to to get what she wants. She is only 15 but has developed early and uses her body, and whatever else she needs to do to satisfy her strange fixations on people. She becomes fixated on Eric, who is being released from prison at the age of 18 after killing his parents. Nobody knows, except the detective, that he is actually a a serial killer and has killed 3 other girls. She saw him back when she was 12, just minutes before, and aft...more
Lori is a girl who will do just about whatever she needs to to get what she wants. She is only 15 but has developed early and uses her body, and whatever else she needs to do to satisfy her strange fixations on people. She becomes fixated on Eric, who is being released from prison at the age of 18 after killing his parents. Nobody knows, except the detective, that he is actually a a serial killer and has killed 3 other girls. She saw him back when she was 12, just minutes before, and aft...more
I enjoyed reading The Chocolate War as a young adolescent in school and was really excited to read another Cormier book. I feel like I should preface what I'm about to say with the fact that I am not a person who is easily offended or shocked by material. That being said, it was only several pages before I began to be seriously disturbed and just simply feeling gross. Keeping an open mind, I pushed forward to see how Cormier would take this plot but was ultimately disappointed. Don't get me wron...more
Wow. I really loved this book. Tenderness tells the story of two teenagers looking for the same thing: tenderness. The paths of Eric, a psychopath serial killer who targets girls, and Lori, who becomes obsessed with someone at the drop of a hat, collide when Lori becomes "fixated" with this charming and seemingly tender boy.
I think it was really well written and very interesting. I loved how the two main characters interacted and how their obsessions interacted. I was intrigued just from readin...more
I think it was really well written and very interesting. I loved how the two main characters interacted and how their obsessions interacted. I was intrigued just from readin...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Robert Cormier is my favorite author.
Lori Cranston is a teenager, too young for her body, who is looking for real love. Eric Poole is a psycopath, too smart for his own good, who is looking for the perfect intimacy. In a strange twist of fate, their intertwined search for what they each call tenderness brings them to each other. It looks like each could be just what the other needs. But will their relationship bring healing...or destruction?
This is a novel about love, lust, and how similar the...more
Lori Cranston is a teenager, too young for her body, who is looking for real love. Eric Poole is a psycopath, too smart for his own good, who is looking for the perfect intimacy. In a strange twist of fate, their intertwined search for what they each call tenderness brings them to each other. It looks like each could be just what the other needs. But will their relationship bring healing...or destruction?
This is a novel about love, lust, and how similar the...more
Cormier is a master at creepiness, that is for certain. I spent quite a bit of time post-read pondering whether or not I would ever recommend this book to a young adult reader. There are some parts that are very intense for young readers, especially one particular scene of sensuality between Lori and a married man, but overall I don't know that I would warn kids away from this book. It would definitely have to be treated as a "read and discuss" book--I would not simply put this book in the hands...more
This book was a complete shock to me. I went into expecting to hate Eric, and probably Lori, too, but still interested in the "mind of a serial killer". I finished it, as many people have said, sympathizing with Eric. However disturbing that might be.
It was extremely disturbing to read from Eric's point of view- he was so cold and calculating, completely inhuman in his plans to kill. He was such a twisted character, yet by the end, I found myself wanting him to get a second chance to start over....more
It was extremely disturbing to read from Eric's point of view- he was so cold and calculating, completely inhuman in his plans to kill. He was such a twisted character, yet by the end, I found myself wanting him to get a second chance to start over....more
This realist young adult fiction novel was about an eighteen-year-old serial killer/rapist and the fifteen-year-old girl who falls in love with him. Eric has just been released from prison, and Lori has just run away from home (again) because her mother’s boyfriend has been feeling her up. Lori gets what she calls random “fixations” with different men; she sees them and feels an incredible urge to find them and kiss them, and then her fixation ends. Lori is pretty and is thus constantly being ta...more
Lori was 12 years old when she met eric. Lori was alone on the railroad tracks and saw eric with a young girl. When eric come back he was all alone. Eric had saved lori when bikers had come to take her he defended her, she was happy and wanted to see the next day if he was there but he was already gone and she had left that town. When lori gets older she gets fixated on people which means she needs to kiss someone but a real like french kissing. Lori likes to help out eric becuase he just got ou...more
This story is told from split perspectives; from Eric Poole's, in third- person, and Lori Cranston's, hers being a first-person narrative. The novel is about these two people and how they come together, and despite their disfunctions, they complete each other. Lori is a girl with a dubious past who uses her body to get what she wants. Her fixations drive her, and she becomes fixated on Eric Poole. Eric is a serial killer, recently released from jail. He has killed more girls than he was tried fo...more
I've never finished a Robert Cormier book without experiencing a deeply reverberating sense of "Wow". The dark corners of the human heart that Robert Cormier explores with the breathtaking skill of a master artisan are enough to give chills to anyone. Revealing the potential horrors of a fiercely tortured soul has a way of affecting people that way.
Beneath and within the text of every page of Tenderness is the unmistakable pulse of real evil; sometimes clear, but mostly flowing just beneath th...more
Beneath and within the text of every page of Tenderness is the unmistakable pulse of real evil; sometimes clear, but mostly flowing just beneath th...more
Eric is a murderer. He killed his parents and went to juvenile detention for it, but he was never tried for the murders of three girls, the girls with whom he finds tenderness, the one thing he keeps looking for, finding it impossible to resist. As he is released from detention, there is only one thought on his mind – how to find that tenderness again.
Lori is a young girl, a runaway. She explains to us that she gets fixated on things. One of those things is Eric Poole and she knows her fixation...more
Lori is a young girl, a runaway. She explains to us that she gets fixated on things. One of those things is Eric Poole and she knows her fixation...more
Disturbing. Tenderness is the story of two emotionally stilted young adults: Lori, a fifteen-year-old runaway with an unhealthy fixation with finding what she calls "tenderness" and Eric, an eighteen-year-old who has just been released from a "facility" he was in for three years for murdering his mother and stepfather. Lori, whose body matured far faster than her emotions, has left home temporarily because her mother's most recent live-in boyfriend has gotten a little too close for comfort. Not...more
I really didn't like this book, primarily because it scared me! Tenderness is a multi character book, the main charcters being: Lori, a young teen who's only way of living is achieving strange ficsations with men, she often lets strange men touch her, she feels this is tenderness. Eric Poole a 19 year old boy who's about to be let out of a delinquent facility after three years for killing his mom and step dad. Eric has also killed three girls, hoping for more. Eric meets Lori years earlier, Lori...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Bleak/ Thriller
Lori is fifteen years old, and has run away from home because of her mother's new boyfriend. Meanwhile, Eric is 18 and has just been released from prison where he has been for the last three years, convicted of murdering his mother and step-father. What the authorities don't know is that he has also killed three young girls. Both teenagers are looking for tenderness and end up on a road trip together. Lori thinks she has found this tenderness in Eric, but he seems disinterested. T...more
Lori is fifteen years old, and has run away from home because of her mother's new boyfriend. Meanwhile, Eric is 18 and has just been released from prison where he has been for the last three years, convicted of murdering his mother and step-father. What the authorities don't know is that he has also killed three young girls. Both teenagers are looking for tenderness and end up on a road trip together. Lori thinks she has found this tenderness in Eric, but he seems disinterested. T...more
I've read what others have to say about this book, and for that reason, Tenderness is quite difficult to explain. I absolutely wanted to hate the story line because it was creepy and almost perverted. Two teens seeking two different types of needs. Lori just wants to be loved for herself and not her body, while Eric, just released from prison, finds pleasure in planning the deaths of his next victims. You expect to hate Eric because he has murdered three girls, his mother, and his step father. Y...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What's The Name o...: Forgotten book-solved [s] | 8 | 130 | Jun 18, 2012 01:34am | |
| Wild Things: YA G...: Tenderness by Robert Cormier | 7 | 25 | Jan 22, 2011 11:55am |
Robert Edmund Cormier (January 17, 1925–November 2, 2000) was an American author, columnist and reporter, known for his deeply pessimistic, downbeat literature. His most popular works include I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, We All Fall Down and The Chocolate War, all of which have won awards. The Chocolate War was challenged in multiple libraries. His books often are concerned with themes...more
More about Robert Cormier...
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.”
—
6 people liked it
“...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.”
—
4 people liked it
More quotes…
