Review of the Week!
As the live-in manager at her father’s funeral home in Burling Gates, Missouri, Vienna Oaks has succumbed to the mediocrity and abject loneliness of her life. Her days are suspended between the mundane and the misery of her clients’ throttling grief, of changing light bulbs, and encountering strangers as bereft as she. But after orchestrating the funeral for a little boy named Parker prompts a severe panic attack, she finds herself at a personal crossroads in which she is forced to confront the pregnancy she’s been hiding, her childhood nemesis, the boy she never stopped loving, and the deep-seated secret surrounding her mother’s death more than a decade before. In another part of town, Heather Turnbull has just learned from her estranged father that her mother, a lifelong recluse, has died. When making arrangements for her funeral, Heather chooses Oaks Family Funeral home, where she comes face to face with Vienna – the woman she tortured throughout grade school, the woman who has recently had an affair with her husband. Together, Vienna and Heather navigate through a makeshift friendship born of circumstance and devised to assuage their ambivalence towards motherhood and their tenuous relationship with reality, discovering, in tandem, the art of forgiveness and the will to go on. With humor and poignancy, Ericka Clay’s debut novel, Unkept, explores the thorny landscape of childhood trauma and the ferocious politics between little girls — and the adults they become.
About the Author
Ericka Clay is a published novelist represented by Robyn Russell and the founding editor of Tipsy Lit. Ericka has been awarded a number of times by Writers Digest for various short fiction pieces, she has written three novels (one of which placed as a quarter-finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest) and is in the process of writing her fourth novel, White Smoke. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband, daughter, two dogs and a particularly unruly imagination.
http://erickaclay.com
Our Review
“…planting the tiniest seeds of hope in a person and watching them birth through a layer of grief…”
Still reeling from the unrelenting emotions I found in Dear Hearts, the Ericka Clay book I read first, I knew I was in for another painful read. And I was right.
This was no story-book romance or mystery, Ericka’s books get you by the throat and force you to witness real life as she sees it.
I know how accurate she is, for I have known people like the characters she portrays and parts of my own life have unfortunately been similar. I suspect there are many more people living lives like this than we know, for some people, life can be hard and unforgiving, making their struggle and determination to find a better one all the more remarkable.
This story was raw, bloody and powerful. The author lays bare all the emotional detritus of human life with the accuracy of a surgeon, exposing the underbelly.
Compelling and vicious, you will remember this book for a long time…
Filed under: books, review Tagged: disturbing, Ericka Clay, memorable, painful, Unkept
