SOULS RAISED FROM THE DEAD : A NOVEL

Rating:
Summary: Soul Stirring
Review: A wonderful novel that stirs the emotions with characters that stay on your mind. The writing is crisp but what shines the brightest are the complex and REAL characters in the novel. A novel that is sure to move even the most stoic of readers.

Rating:
Summary: Soul Stirring
Review: I almost gave up on this book after the first 100 pages. After encountering the overprotective father, the plucky but seriously ill daughter, and the narcissistic, self-indulgent mother who had deserted the family two years earlier, the stars seemed in alignment for an overwrought, maudlin tearjerker. Instead, Doris Betts has given us a finely told, thoughtful story about those things we cling to when disaster befalls, especially about the exercise of faith in the absence of any reason to hope. The writing is often superb, as in this observation about the girl's grandmother: "Sex was more important to men than it had ever been to Tacey. Maybe those old Jewish male prophets valued sex so highly it had attained to them the level of sin; she did not, so it had not." Or this, a description of women waiting for their men in the hospital emergency room: "These women wasted no energy by pacing. None of them touched a magazine. They solidified themselves in the first chairs they had taken some time ago, and waited like stones for something external to make them move." Most characters are well-developed; the plot is only moderately suspenseful, but surprisingly compelling nonetheless. I wished that the author had delved more into the inner life of Frank, the main character, and I thought a few plot turns bordered on the implausible. Nonetheless, Betts has done remarkably well telling a story which initially appears unpromising.

Rating:
Summary: good writing triumphs over unpromising material
Review: I almost gave up on this book after the first 100 pages. After encountering the overprotective father, the plucky but seriously ill daughter, and the narcissistic, self-indulgent mother who had deserted the family two years earlier, the stars seemed in alignment for an overwrought, maudlin tearjerker. Instead, Doris Betts has given us a finely told, thoughtful story about those things we cling to when disaster befalls, especially about the exercise of faith in the absence of any reason to hope. The writing is often superb, as in this observation about the girl's grandmother: "Sex was more important to men than it had ever been to Tacey. Maybe those old Jewish male prophets valued sex so highly it had attained to them the level of sin; she did not, so it had not." Or this, a description of women waiting for their men in the hospital emergency room: "These women wasted no energy by pacing. None of them touched a magazine. They solidified themselves in the first chairs they had taken some time ago, and waited like stones for something external to make them move." Most characters are well-developed; the plot is only moderately suspenseful, but surprisingly compelling nonetheless. I wished that the author had delved more into the inner life of Frank, the main character, and I thought a few plot turns bordered on the implausible. Nonetheless, Betts has done remarkably well telling a story which initially appears unpromising.

Rating:
Summary: Book fails to raise plot, characters from the dead.
Review: While my tears flowed in several places throughout Souls Raised from the Dead, I found myself dry-eyed and skeptical at the end. Betts' novel of a girl on the cusp of adolescence diagnosed with kidney disease and surrounded by a myriad of colorful adult figures could have been so much more than the plot-driven surface treatment she gave the characters. Mary Grace Thompson suffers from kidney failure, but Betts never tells the reader what that involves. Only as the reader turns the pages do the stages of dietary restrictions, dialysis, increased medications, and hope for a donor become clear as the next steps. Betts' implied medical horror is only a shadow compared to the black and white truth of medical reality. I would have been happier knowing the clinical details; however, the in's and out's of kidney failure were not the focus of this book. And therein lies my biggest disappointment with Souls Raised from the Dead. The book's focus was the cliched characters and their relationships--stoic father and prickly, loving, daughter; selfish irresponsible ex-wife and two current girl-friends with different needs and wants; self-righteous grandparents and "white trash" grandparents who have a good heart where Mary is concerned. Betts did not delve into their personalities enough to make me emphathize with them. The dialogue was stilted, though some of the one-sentence descriptions were poigniant. Betts describes Mary Thompson's thoughts through the stages of her illness with clarity, though Betts never shows how Mary's feelings of isolation, denial and detachedness affect her relationships with her father or grandparents. Betts also delved into the character of Tacey Thompson, Mary's paternal grandmother, and her struggle with a faith contradicted by reality. Initially, I was prepared for a wrenching story, but by the end of the book, I was annoyed with the predictable plot and could easily visualize this as a made-for-TV movie.