Revenge : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: packs an emotional series of punches
Review: Andrea teaches at Hartwood College in Connecticut, a small exclusive school plagued by budget problems so that she is unsure of whether she will gain tenure. She often thinks of her father, driving when he was heavily medicated on hypertension drugs and antidepressants; she blames her stepmother for allowing him to drive. Andrea ponders why she never visited him in the hospital when he lied in a coma or why she and her brother were left out of his will.

Andrea's neighbor, the internationally famous Loretta Partlow, deliberately cultivates a friendship between them. Over the course of a year, Andrea tells her personal story to the author hoping that she would write a book about it. However Andrea begins to trust Loretta thinking of her as a friend and surrogate mother so that when the writer accomplishes what she originally hoped for by authoring a book, she feels betrayed.

There is little action in this novel as much of the tale consists of conversations between the two women. The shock that Andrea feels when Loretta writes a fictionalized account of her life feels genuine as does the anger when the older woman no longer wants her around as she got what she wanted out of her. REVENGE packs an emotional series of punches as the two lives of the two females converge until one like a soul sucking vampire leaves the other withered and dry, but trying to find a new direction without the negativity that has haunted her.

Harriet Klausner


Rating:
Summary: Obsession
Review: Excellently crafted! The characters in "Revenge" are so believably written, you NEED to know what happens next. I wanted to follow them past their appearance in this book, even though the book ends at the perfect spot.
A book you can't put down, and one you'll think about long after you've finished. I think it would make a good choice for a book discussion group.

Rating:
Summary: Read This Book
Review: I love the neat inevitability of this story, how doomed the heroine, Andrea, feels from the get-go, how complicit she is in her fate, and yet how full of fresh promise she emerges in the very last pages. Reeling out a taut line of tension between her scheming characters, Morris snags the reader. She also does a masterful job of establishing the complex role that Andrea's art, her painting, plays in her life. The paintings themselves, a feverish outpouring as Andrea plots her revenge, are rendered brilliantly in Morris's prose; even now as I recall them the images spring to mind as if I'd seen the paintings in the artist's studio, rather than had them described. Love, friendship, solace, stability -- all are elusive for Andrea. But her fierce devotion to her work, and its dense weave of meaning, sustain her throughout. I love that. This is a terrific book.

Rating:
Summary: A highly suspenseful, beautifully written novel.
Review: I picked up Revenge on a day when I felt I barely had time to brush my teeth and ended up staying up late to finish this compelling novel. The heroine, an artist named Andrea, is immediately sympathetic and as I turned the pages I became increasingly absorbed in her struggles to come to terms with her father's death and with her own precarious situation, teaching at a small college. When she becomes friends with her neighbour, a famous writer, I hoped for the best and feared the worst. Neither quite come true and that, for me, is one of the most impressive feats of this elegant book. I never knew what was going to happen next but whatever did happen seemed both surprising and just right. Highly recommended.