Rating: 
Summary: In Defense of this Book . . .
Review: I enjoyed "Invisible Eden" and was surprised that so many fellow Amazonites didn't. When I scanned through the reviews, I found that most objected to the literary style and the "moralism" of speaking ill of the dead. "Invisible Eden" is definitely not for everyone, and definitely not for those who prefer the traditional style of true crime fiction (Ann Rule et al). This book is over 400 pages, with many "sidelights" (Flook's questionable relationship with the District Attorney, information about the founding of Truro, local Cape festivals, the troubles of the Worthington family, etc). These sidelights give the book a lot of texture - they paint a larger picture of the community that Christa Worthington lived in. . Traditional true crime fiction tends to be journalistic, factual rather than lyric narrative, and "objective" in style. "Invisible Eden" is literary nonfiction, and doesn't have much in common with most of the genre IMO. Much of the writing is poetic. There's a tone of melancholy throughout, as the writer becomes increasingly wrapped up in her subject's life and memory. Vignettes from Flook's real life (i.e. the scene where the cat sheds blood from his paw) illustrate the way Ms.Worthington haunts the author. This is NOT something you find in Ann Rule, et al. So be warned! Do keep in mind, though, that Maria Flook has startling access to the investigation through her relationship with D.A. O'Keefe. This up-front look might be interesting to true-crime aficianados. Some people object to the portrait of Ms. Worthington that emerges in the book. It's quite a mixed bag. This is typical of most lives, though. Most of us, if we had our lives chronicled, would emerge as whole people with good characteristics (Ms. Worthington is a devoted mother, intellectually curious, dedicated to her writing, mischevious) and weaknesses (inability to seek peace and happiness, attraction to married men, manipulative behavior, etc). Many books about deceased people tend to treat them like saints - this one doesn't. Ms. Worthington emerges as a person with serious flaws, but she is treated by the author with sympathy and identification. For all the flack about the "made up" parts of the book (Ms. Worthington's infrequent interior monologues, etc), I prefer Flook's approach because it seems more intellectually honest than a "St. Victim" approach. One of the lingering questions people raise seems to be: what will happen when/if Ava Worthington reads this book? There's no question that she will be upset by the portion describing the horrifying circumstances of her mother's death. But she will also know that her mother was a complicated woman who had many adventures, faced many personal demons, and loved Ava fiercely and above all. To make a long story short (too late!) if you are a fan of literary nonfiction, or open to trying a non-traditional form of true crime fiction, I think (hope) you'll like this lyrical account.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating view inside a regional murder
Review: I expected the formulaic true-crime format in this treatment of the murder of Christa Worthington in Flook's Invisible Eden. But the author shows a superior quality of writing from the first chapter. Flook isn't just reporting the facts; she is immersing herself in the life of a single mother, like herself, who lived not far away from Flook's own home. The murder of Christa Worthington in 2002 remains unsolved. From a historical, wealthy but dysfunctional family, Christa's life was not made easier by the wealth that supported her lifestyle. As a New York fashion writer, the clever young woman moved in the esoteric circles of the fashion world, the rarified, if plastic life of image vs. reality. Not exactly the kind of work to enrich an already confused life, especially for a Vassar graduate of the 70's, with high expectations for herself. Like the other women in her family, Christa had eclectic taste in men, but before her death in her mid-forties, Christa's most significant accomplishment was the birth of her daughter, Ava, whose father was a married man of Portuguese descent. The beautiful child was Christa's work-in-progress. Sadly, Christa gave birth soon after the death of her mother, having already been abandoned by Ava's father. The loss of her mother must have been exceptionally difficult for the pregnant Christa, holding vigil at the bedside of a critical, unhappy woman who had not done a good job of parenting her lonely, brilliant daughter. Neither Christa nor her mother is ever accepted by the Worthington clan, an iconoclastic group who writes their own rules in a closed society. The crime occurred on the desolate dunes of Truro, a Cape Cod town best remembered as the setting for Bronte's Wuthering Heights, where nature rules with her own chaos, reminding the island inhabitants of their impermanence. There is a cast of the usual suspects: the men in Christa's life, father included, the wife of baby Ava's father, his daughter, son and son-in-law. Certainly there is no paucity of possible perpetrators. But as Flook so deftly illustrates, this is a crime of passion, a quick burst of rage against a young woman without moorings, save the little daughter she adored. Perhaps the wildness of the locale contributed to the act; certainly passion at the edge of the world informed the senses of those involved in Christa's romantic dramas and inability to find purchase in a life spinning out of control. Her home as chaotic as her emotions, clearly Christa was struggling, little Ava the only tangible asset to her damaged and abandoned psyche. Christa is not just another of society's rejects, a single mother living in bewilderment, forging her own path and losing her way in emotional entanglements. One day her daughter will need to make sense of this brutal loss and this book may be a resource for unraveling the facts surrounding the senseless murder of Christa Worthington. The impression I am left with is not one of judgment of Christa's lifestyle or choices, but rather a compassionate, honest appraisal of the facts as offered by extensive resources, friends, classmates and former business associates. Christa was a woman beset with the fears and insecurities of her childhood, never safe, always moving, even self-sabotaging. How shocking to realize that Christa was right, after all. She wasn't safe. Luan Gaines/2004.
Rating: 
Summary: atrocious writing
Review: I'm only several chapters into this book, and though the story is interesting, I can't believe the poor level of writing. Does this author write cheap romances? A few examples speak for themselves:
"...he captained her onto the pillowy pier of her Posturpedic."
(I was ready to drop the book after reading that one)
"Casanovia college boys, their surfboards strapped onto their cars like fiberglass codpieces..."
(this allusion makes no sense at all, you do not strap a codpiece on a roof, it would more resemble the "bras" on sportscars. Now if she had said fiberglass phaluses it would be bad, but at least closer)
Only 375 pages to go.
Rating:
Summary: Read it and judge for yourself.
Review: I'm surprised that so many people have panned this book, since I enjoyed it very much. Perhaps it's because I love the Outer Cape and always seek a regional book to read during the time that I vacation there each summer. Thus, I enjoyed the background lore of the place that Maria Flook provides and, as another reviewer has noted, I was not troubled by the critical portrait of Christina Worthington, since her character rang quite true for me. I live in NYC year-round and have met many young women of the type I believe Ms. Worthington to have been -- highly intelligent but directionless and self-abosrbed. I didn't find Flook's characterization of Worthington so much negative as realistic. Worthington's murder remains the talk of the Outer Cape, even several years after the fact, probably because humans dislike the unknown and most of us long to feel safe, which we can't so long as murderers remain at large among us. As far as I know, no one has been arrested for the crime, although the father of Worthington's child seems to no longer be a suspect. It's hard to imagine what sort of threat this befuddled woman presented to her killer, so I tend to go along with Flook's contention that this was a crime of passion, perhaps even committed on the spur of the moment. In any case, Flook has thoroughly documented events leading up to the murder, as well as the subsequent investigation by small town law enforcement. I found it to be an interesting study and encourage readers who like "true crime" books to check it out for themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Read it and judge for yourself.
Review: I'm surprised that so many people have panned this book, since I enjoyed it very much. Perhaps it's because I love the Outer Cape and always seek a regional book to read during the time that I vacation there each summer. Thus, I enjoyed the background lore of the place that Maria Flook provides and, as another reviewer has noted, I was not troubled by the critical portrait of Christina Worthington, since her character rang quite true for me. I live in NYC year-round and have met many young women of the type I believe Ms. Worthington to have been -- highly intelligent but directionless and self-abosrbed. I didn't find Flook's characterization of Worthington so much negative as realistic. Worthington's murder remains the talk of the Outer Cape, even several years after the fact, probably because humans dislike the unknown and most of us long to feel safe, which we can't so long as murderers remain at large among us. As far as I know, no one has been arrested for the crime, although the father of Worthington's child seems to no longer be a suspect. It's hard to imagine what sort of threat this befuddled woman presented to her killer, so I tend to go along with Flook's contention that this was a crime of passion, perhaps even committed on the spur of the moment. In any case, Flook has thoroughly documented events leading up to the murder, as well as the subsequent investigation by small town law enforcement. I found it to be an interesting study and encourage readers who like "true crime" books to check it out for themselves.
Rating:
Summary: How could this book get published
Review: Is there a such thing as Editorial Malpractice? If not we have a test case here. This literally reads like a draft that went straight to press without any second look. Those of us lucky enough to be familiar with Truro will also be troubled by Flook's inability to portray anything with accuracy. I really did not like this.
Rating: 
Summary: Starr Reporter
Review: Nearly everybody beats up on this book, with good reason.
The author treats the romantic life of the subject -- fashion writer Christa Worthington, a victim of an unsolved murder on Cape Cod -- as if it were a dirty joke, and I do mean dirty. Every coupling in this unmarried mother's life is decribed in the most graphic and profane terms possible, until I found myself thinking of the clinical nastiness of the Starr Report accounts of the couplings between President Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky. (Worthington, all too presciently, is said to have remarked that in affairs with married men, "Every woman is the intern" -- powerless and rendered contemptible in the public gaze). Some of Worthington's lovers -- who may include her killer -- were all too happy to give salacious details of their encounters, such as the seedy bar magician who likens Worthington's computer trackball to a body part.
Flook is all too willing to type up whatever these men said about the dead woman, though some of this degrading stuff may be necrophiliac fantasy. It's a surprising performance, given the thoughtfulness and delicacy with which the author handled sensitive family material in her memoir, "My Sister Life." Come to think of it, this book is a bit of a memoir, too, with the much-decried chapters about her flirtation with the district attorney on the Worthington case.
These interludes are probably there to pad out the book, which has the frustrating central defect of being a true-crime book with no resolution to write about, since no arrests have been made. That said, the structure is familiar to readers of Elmore Leonard novels and many works of non-fiction, in which chapters alternate among the parallel stories of different people. This device manufactures a little artificial suspense, in this case, including -- rather weakly -- the questions of whether the DA will win re-election and whether he and the author will get involved romantically, while tracking the victim's career and "downward spiral" and the parts played by other figures in the case.
There's also a good bit of rather undigested local history of the Outer Cape, where the author lives and hints at a messy, transgressive history of her own that ties her to the victim's story. Flook may have been trying for a more ambitious illumination of the basic sexual inequalities between men and women. Worthington, for instance, is presented as having tried, disastrously, to Have It All, as Madonna and Whore in one carelessly used body. Meanwhile, as her sort-of-biographer, the memoirist Flook maintains superior status by repeatedly spurning the DA's rather mechanical advances.
There isn't a single positive male-female relationship among any of the real-life characters in this book. Overall, there's a bitter tone to the narrative that comes out in the jarring, irregular use of profanity and the author's sneers at practically everyone she meets. Why does Flook -- self-announced as a parent -- dismiss fortyish single women who are trying to get pregnant as "wannabe mommies"? And why blast Weight Watchers (which helped Worthington, after her daughter's birth, lose some weight) as "America's favorite institution for fatties"? Gosh. What about all the wised-up, hard-won feminism Flook displays elsewhere in the book? Are women who don't give birth in their 20s, dropping excess weight effortlessly, booted out of the sisterhood? Who died and made her Queen of the Lifestylistas?
Given the time frame -- the crime is barely a cold case -- it's possible that the author was rushed and irritable, trying on a persona that seemed to fit the law enforcement/working class milieu of most of the book. But it doesn't fit Flook, who is really a much better writer than this book shows. When the going gets tough, the tough cookie needs to go shopping == for a style that's more comfortable to her.
Rating:
Summary: Worst "true-crime" (yeah, right) book I ever read! Fiction!
Review: Perhaps this author has mastered her craft in other genres, but she has no idea how to write a true-crime novel. My impression was that this book was an autobiography of the pretentious and self-absorbed Maria Flook rather than about the tragic murder of Christa Worthington...a woman the author never met, however that doesn't stop Flook from declairing herself an authority on her life; not because she conducted any relevant interviews or investigations, but because they "lived in the same town", and they were both "single parents". After desperately reading page after page of relentlessly over-worded and mind-numbingly boring and irrevelent text, I finally tossed this book aside at the start of the final chapter---confident that nothing would be illuminated or resolved, and refusing to allow this book to waste any more of my life.
Rating:
Summary: Literary true crime
Review: The intriguing thing about the unsolved murder of Christa Worthington is that it took place in an isolated community with a limited caste of suspects.
Maria Flook is not a mere journalist. She is a fine writer able to adorn her story with many literary flourishes. This book contains a lot of interesting descriptions of the Paris and New York fashion journalism scenes and about Vassar and the university of East Anglia and the sociology and history of Cape Cod.
She goes into great detail about several of Christa's former lovers and implies that one of them may have been the man who had sex with her just before she was killed. The fact is that all of them were excluded by DNA testing. (The possibility remains that that man was not the murderer).
She skimps on following the money trail. For example she says that the Grammercy Square apartment was sold for "an undisclosed amount." A mere journalist would have found out how much. (The house given to Christa by her father was recently sold for a million dollars).
Every writer of true crime lives in the shadow of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Maria Flook is a talented writer. I recommend that you read her book. I recommend that you do not read "In Cold Blood.' It is not a nice experience. In order to avoid reading it, do not ever let yourself look at one page. If you do that you will have to read the book. That's the difference between talent and genius.
Rating: 
Summary: All About Christa Worthington's life and tragic murder
Review: This book is a strange but true drama. A woman is found murdered with her little daughter clinging to her. Flook takes a look at the story of the murder victim, Christa Worthington, basing her research on interviews and looking at some of the magazine writings of Christa. Flook though sympathetic to Worthington presents a "warts and all" portrait of this young woman from a prominent family. Christa Worthington had the "best of everything," including a Vassar education, work at prestigious magazines, including a stint in Paris. However, her personal life was far more tumultuous given Ms. Worthington's disappointments with her love interests and her penchant for being with married men. One married man, Tony Jackett, had an affair with her resulting in the conception of Ava, Christa's only child. After several abortions and fertility problems, Christa wanted a baby and conceived one with Jackett (she told him she could not conceive). The affair of Worthington and Jackett was hard to read because both seemed totally unsympathetic (though Jackett seemed genuinely to love Ava and wanted custody of her after Christa's death). Susan Jackett, Tony's rather put upon spouse came across as one of the most sympathetic characters in the book, next to Christa's mother, Gloria. Christa seemed rather a tragic figure since there were many what ifs in her life (she was considered talented enough to write a novel and she envied her friend's stable marriages and family lives). The murder cut her life short and cruelly separated her from her young daughter that she so very much wanted. Overall, this is a good book and Flook honestly presents Christa Worthington and her many facets: at one point she is vulnerable and likeable and during her affair, selfish and unlikeable. I really felt much sympathy and admiration for Susan Jackett as I read about the Jackett-Worthington affair. Whether or not the mystery of Christa's murder is solved, readers can't help hope that Ava Worthington goes on to have a better life than her mother and learns how much her mother did love her.
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