Body Sharers: A Novel (Rutgers Press Fiction)

By Lisa Lanser Rose and Elisabeth Rose

Fourteen-year-old Cam's discovery of her mother's dead body launches a dark and powerful, if at times unsubtle first novel. Cam's absentee father sends her to live with a distant step-cousin, Scofield, and his wife Marge. A complex interplay of points of view--Cam's first-person reminiscences and the third-person narratives of Scofield, Marge, and others--chronicles her childhood, beset by tragedy and abuse. Repeatedly raped at age four by Scofield himself, Cam was initiated into "body sharing" as the nine-year-old victim of a coterie of her teachers; at thirteen she had an abortion. Now, while Cam seeks solace in sex with an older girl named Dana, Scofield again forces her into a physical relationship that finally drives her to the end of her tolerance and to despair. The author explores Cam's intense, precocious sexuality with a fearless honesty that gives her character a disturbing vividness. Yet the fiercely sensual imagery sometimes comes across as ponderous overwriting or awkward abstraction, as when she describes a woman's eyeshadow as "a jar on a pasture hill, a curtain sewn across a valley." In addition, the intrusion of an absurdly gothic element--Scofield is plagued by a phantom dog--mars the admirable verisimilitude achieved in Cam's personality. For the most part, though, Rose's ambitious foray into difficult territory makes for a highly affecting debut.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813519349
• ISBN13: 9780813519340
• Release Date: May 1993
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 155 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.8"