Apple of My Eye

by Patrick Redmond

Book Overview

Ronnie Sidney is a perfect child. The illegitimate son of a wartime romance, he gives his mother the unconditional love she so craves. In his mother's eyes Ronnie is faultless: a ray of sunshine in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743219937
• ISBN13: 9780743219938
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Gardners Books
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good poignant story but it lacks human flesh

This novel has all the plot and details it needs to be a great story. Intricate circumstances that are mostly believable even if at times rather extreme. There is also a lot of pathos, empathy and compassion. The story of two generations of young people, the first generation becoming grownups, the fathers and mothers of the second generation. The first remark here is that the two younger ones, a boy and a girl, a daughter and a son, are both deprived of their fathers, by different circumstances but the result is the same. This is a characteristic that reveals something about the imagination of the author. The boy is deprived of his father even before birth, a soldier on the way to the front in 1944. The daughter is deprived of hers by his sudden death when she is seven, in front of her eyes due to a massive heart attack. The two mothers have one single problem : to survive and both will reach the same solution : to get married for one and remarried for the other. In the first case it will be with a good man. In the second case with a despicable man. But the only objective was wealth both for themselves and for their children, though it seems to be more for the son than the mother in one case, and definitely for the mother more than the daughter in the other case. The whole book is thus the detailed stories of these two children who become teenagers. The daughter will live on her recollection of her father and suffer the stepfather who is abusing her sexually as long as she is a child. He stops when she gets into puberty. The son will survive with relatives who despise his mother and exploit and humiliate her. What is amazing is that both will develop a killing instinct, in the daughter's case to protect those she loves, and in the son's case to get even with those who make him or those he loves suffer, including by killing an innocent child if necessary. It is possible, for sure, but rather extreme and kind of rather schematic as an explanation : the absent father is an easy and convenient explanation that does not convince many people any more. The real criminal mind has been deprived of his father from birth and raised by his humiliated mother in a constant environment of vexations and insults. And yet we find it hard to believe. Something is missing. It is the deeper personal fantasizing that any mental construction needs in order to exist. In other words there is no depth in these characters' psyches because they are only working along some kind of purely logical line. What's more they speak and they live most of the time with other children or teenagers. And there the novel becomes unbelievable. The children and the teenagers speak the same language as the narrator, as the author, mainly an adult language in perfect oxfordian syntax. And that makes the story cold, even distant. We do not feel these kids, and yet the situations and events should create a lot of pathos, and it does not as much as it could have done. Which explains why the end

Five star read

This book kept me intrigued from start to finish. The two main characters - Ronnie and Susan have been damaged in some way in their childhood and it shows what can happen when they get older and meet - and the two are soulmates. But this is no love story - it is a brilliant psychological thriller with a lot of emotion and sadness too. The book starts off with an account of Ronnie's life with his single mother Anna, and the nasty family they have to live with in his early childhood - his aunt and her sons are constantly cruel to him and his mother and that has a big influence on his personality. It then goes on give us background on Susan's life, whose mother remarries after her father's death to a man outwardly popular and wealthy in the community but who rapes his step-daughter at night. The story goes through the years of their childhood which sets the scene for the tragedies that are to follow. The pace and build up of when they meet took its time, but it was a very interesting journey getting there and getting to know their characters and motivations as it set the scene for when they finally meet when they are teenagers. I liked their early days together as they really seemed suited to each other, until other events took place. The characters were real, the storylines (particularly Susan's) will make you feel real emotion for her and anger and the cruelty of schoolkids. Despite this she is a strong character. And it also gets frightening and suspenseful towards the end - but we were expecting something like that throughout the whole book and had a few surprises towards the end. Ronnie is a tragic figure, keeping his secrets well hidden from everyone that even I wasn't sure whether he had really done something truly bad as it did allude to it early on, but not until he finally reveals it is his personality really shown for what he is (a sociopath). Despite this I really felt for Susan and in a small way hoped they could stay together, but it could never be after finding out his dark secret and I hoped he could just let her go. Ronnie I found hard to get to know, but that's probably because he had 2 faces and only showed the good side. I found his relationship with his mother to be a bit unnaturall (and its not exactly cool to be a mummy's boy)and he was very submissive towards her. Both his and Susan's mothers were very naive and weak characters. The ending was good too as it left you with some hope for Susan. I highly recommend this book - I read it in two sittings!