⭐️⭐️⭐️
Pros: Though Dolores sometime makes bad choices and can be difficult, you’re rooting for her unequivocally/That gut-punch in Part 3 😞/Lamb is a master at ending and he had me tearing up at times.
Cons: I kind of wish Dolores would stop sabotaging herself at every turn/Her mercurial moods got old/Her relationship with Dante started off badly and just got worse.
Full Review:
This is the story of Dolores Price. We watch as she grows from a child, to a teenager and into adulthood.
Along the way she has to learn how to navigate the tricky parts of life and for Dolores a lot of her life is tricky. Her parents divorce, she learns that her mother is unwell and is soon hospitalized.
Dolores goes to live with her aloof, staunchly Catholic, overbearing Grandmother. And once her mother is discharged and comes to live with them, Dolores has to try and figure out her place in her family and the world.
It’s not an easy journey, though Dolores doesn’t always make the best decisions and sometimes makes things needlessly complicated for herself. Regardless, through successes/failures and somewhere in between Lamb paints Dolores in an honest, heartfelt, sometimes aggravating but always genuine light.
Where Lamb truly excels are his endings and I admit, this book was no different. I was tearing up because it was all done so well and so honestly that it pulled at the heart strings. Though there were times where I wanted to grab Dolores, shake her and yell, "Make better choices" in the end, she was simply human. Flawed, emotional, confused and just trying to make the best of the cards she was dealt.
Ended here.
Part One - Sorrowful Woman
Dolores Price remembers growing up with her parents. Her mother lost a. Ahh and she was never quite the same. Years later, after it’s revealed that her father was having an affair and is leaving them, her mother gets worse and is put in a state hospital. Dolores goes to love with her Grandmother in Rhode Island. She tries to acclimate to life in a parochial school and her two neighbors who are is plain mean to her.
Dolores herself seems to get off ok having power over others. So far I’m interested to see where it leads as Lambs writing is quick and easily readable.
Her parents divorce. Her mother is institutionalized for 7 months. When she’s released they go to live with her mother. Dolores grandmother is strict and religious. She is a constant judge of Dolores and her mother.
She hates school, has no friends and is miserable.
New neighbors move in and Dolores is taken with Jack. They have a friendship, kind of a flirtation. But when he’s fires from his DJ job, he picks her up after school and takes her to the woods and he rapes her. Just because she had a crush on him does NOT mean it’s ok. She eventually tells one of the neighbors and they go to tell her mother,
Part 2 - Whales
She grows older. Is smart but unwilling to apply herself. When it comes time for College, Dolores doesn’t want to go. Her mother writes her essay and she gets in.
When her mother is struck and killed by a truck at work, Dolores decides to go ri College. Give it a try. Her room mate is a bitch. Everyone’s pretty awful cause Dolores is fat and it sets her apart. The janitor, Dottie doesn’t care though. She says she loves Dolores and after Dolores is pseudo-assaulted by her room mates gross bro BF, Dolores knees him in the balls and runs to Dottie’s. They have sex and then Dolores kills her fish and runs off.
She pays a taxi driver to take her all the way to Cape Cod. They talk about God and Dolores is complicated and confusing at every turn. I just can’t quite figure out why she does what she does. Sighs.
They get to Wellfleet on the cape. Edge watches a whale die and freaks out. Domingo’s her driver, takes her to her motel and makes her comfortable, worried. She doesn’t want his pity. Shes her usual rude self as he leaves and then cries when she sees he only took $100 of the $400 she promised. Ugh.
She Geneva Sweet, who has called her after her mother’s funeral. Dolores has hung up on her then, she’s receptive at first but then her mood shifts and she goes back to the dead whale. She strips and has a moment with the dead whale as she tries to kill herself but finds she can’t do it. She’s sits on the beach a long time, until a man in a jeep drives up, He asks her if she’s Dolores Price, she nods and says some people have been looking for her. They worried about her. He radioes it in.
Part Three - The Flying Leg
She’s been institutionalized at Graceview. A posh mental hospital for rich kids. Paid for by Geneva Price. She’d been worried about her since getting that odd phone call from bed from the cape.
She makes progress but is still belligerent and difficult. She makes great strides with Dr. Shaw. Him acting as surrogate mother. It’s a bit odd but at the same time Lamb just makes it work.
Lamb delivers a real punch when Dolores reveals that she knew about the affair. She knew about her mother and Jack. And he raped her for Gods sake. Ugh.
While Dolores works at a photo lab by day, she lives at a halfway house and continues her work with Shaw. Shes become a bit of a famous Etch a Sketch artist.
She has a falling out with Shaw when she starts visiting a Psychic 🙄Charlatans and all that. Ugh, Dolores!
She moves out of the halfway house and moves all the way to Mont Peltier CT because she develops a film roll from a school trip and her college roommates boyfriend, Dante, whom Dolores kept the naked pictures of (weirdo), just happened to be a chaperone.
So, she drops everything and moves to VT sure that Dante is the man she’s supposed to be with. Sure, this’ll end well.
She and Dante meet and start dating. She’s okayed her cards well. Until she gets pregnant and he basically forces she’s to have an abortion. She never quite forgives herself for that. They eventually get married but after 4 years of catering to his every whim, it all ends when Dolores grandmother passes away ans Dante is fired for his dalliances with a student. Dolores has had enough. She tells him everything. Everything.
He divorces her and since she’s the sole heir of her Grandmother, she inherits the house. She begins a friendship with the loud mouthed, brash neighbor Roberta, who was the first person Dolores told about being rapped by Jack.
She starts working again, taking classes at night. She tries to get her life on track but it’s not easy. She reconnects with Mr. Pucci, her old guidance counselor and is there for him when his lover passes sway from AIDs and he eventually dies from it as well. He tells her that he’s realized now at the end that people squander their lives by not accepting others love. And so Dolores decides to marry Thayer, a fellow student at night school whom she was trying to have a baby with.
Though it ends with her seemingly unable to get pregnant, she seems happy with Thayer and this life she has now. Roberta lives with them as well and her childhood home is no longer one of repression but one of genuine love.
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