Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

Book Overview

Sylvia Sandon always swore she wouldn't become her mother. But one August morning she finds herself walking the same path as the fervently religious yet faithless Elaine...into an affair she feels powerless to resist. Against the backdrop of California brush fires in the 1970s, twelve-year-old Sylvia had agreed to hold a secret that would devour her family's dream of happiness. Now struggling to create a better life in small-town New England, Sylvia...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0778328899
• ISBN13: 9780778328896
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: Mira Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Savagely Real

I bought this book at a walmart of all places, setting next to the familiar Nicolas Sparks novels. I haven't finished the book yet, I'm at that critical part, 1:35 in the morning, that I know I'll be staying up all night to finish it or fall asleep trying. The style is smart but not presumptuous, and beautifully captures the essence of what it means to be a woman, to grow into being a woman, and all the stark feelings accompanying. Sincerely? my newest favorite author. - MFA dying to move to California.

Walking to the very edge of ruin

What a pleasure--a debut novel with writing so intense and lyrical that it causes the reader to ache with the characters' own pain. Indeed, Outside the Ordinary World tells a painful story; the ghosts from artist Sylvie Sandon's childhood are gathering in the wings, holding her family and her happiness hostage until she lets go of guilt and anger. Alternating between Sylvie as a child in California and the adult Sylvie in rural New England, author Dori Ostermiller unfolds the story. When Sylvie was a child, her beautiful and very religious mother had a long-standing love affair, escaping the monotony of her marriage to a busy surgeon. Worse, she made her daughters accomplices to the affair with "Mr. Robert," even taking them on vacations with her lover when their father was out of town. Thirty years later, speaking to her daughter who is heading down the same path, she says, "...I've been there. I know how intoxicating it is to have a man's desire and secret devotion--to be adored, seduced, seen--married life pales in comparison...But it's a dangerous game, Sylvia. It will tear you apart." The young Sylvie, herself seduced by Mr. Robert's humor and dreams--and feeling rejected by her distant, abusive father--believed that she had encouraged her mother to choose Mr. Robert, with disastrous consequences. After years spent running from her past, her own marriage has turned distant with the stress of work and parenting. Inevitably, another man's humor and dreams draw her and she "becomes her mother." When her family is on the brink of destruction, can she learn anything from her past that will save them? The women in the story are exquisitely drawn, though the men are less rounded. There seems nothing in Sylvie's husband to repel, nothing in her lover to particularly attract. The story, carried forward with a great structure and atmosphere, is after all an old story: an unresolved past blocking mindfulness of the present. But oh, the writing! The pitch-perfect phrases, the sometimes bitter self-awareness of a woman spinning out of control, the recurring themes--writing that taps straight into your emotions. Give yourself some space to read this book deliberately; but do read it. Linda Bulger, 2010

Extraordinary on the Outside

Let me tell you why I love this book. Have you noticed the current trend in fiction these days - I have, I buy them for a living -many of the popular ones tell good stories, and more often than not they feature protagonists who are supernatural or canine or both. They are engrossing, for the length of time it takes to read them, but they lack an individual persona like a preteen who relinquishes her stunning uniqueness for the false safety of a peer identity. "Outside the Ordinary World" is not just the title of a book, it is its identity. Ostermiller writes exquisitely. Her prose style is as dynamic as her fire imagery; it gently flickers, quietly smolders, suddenly sears, or can rage unpredictably. Read this: "I was trembling like an addict as I stumbled after him, my thoughts feral and haphazard -predestination, species extinction. The last plagues - how many were there again? What were they called?" Ah, prose with a comedic, self-observing ego that doesn't take itself too seriously. Well, until it does. From the first page: "Though I've never been taught to believe in purgatory, it must be a place like this ... a land where we linger, mourning our nature like obstinate children whose parents warned them about the crack in the sidewalk, the fissure in the glass, the lethal fork in the trail." Over and over again, sentences like these held me, asking me to not let them go, and while I could see the storyline over their shoulders -a beckoning force --I let them hold me, not a difficult choice really, it is what I hunger for when I read and too often find myself settling instead for meager lesses. If other reviewers proclaim, "I couldn't put this book down", do not think I misled you. Yes I savored sentences, and often, but they also afforded me some relief from a deftly contrived tension that Ostermiller sets up -- and fans continually-- the potential that devastating family secrets (as safe as love letters hidden in a flimsy cardboard box) could be uncovered at any moment. While family secrets, usually coupled with infidelity, are subjects often explored in fiction, what is unusual here is that Ostermiller's characters -mothers, fathers, daughters, lovers --are psychologically complex and achingly human. You won't find any heroines or villains, rather a mix of extraordinary characters that share a common trait, they are flawed. Characters that are drawn --- like moths to a flame -- to either repeat or rebel against the patterns that have led those their family members before them towards self-destruction, redemption, or perhaps even worse, mediocrity. This novel is outside of the ordinary. It is appropriate that Sylvia is an artist. For her in world, just like one of her brilliant paintings, what is seen is just the top layer of oils. Beneath them, layer upon layer, lie the painstaking history of its making.

A motherlode of topics

I wish I were still working at a bookstore so I could hand sell this "Outside the Ordinary World." It's no pun that there's a motherlode of topics to fascinate and transfix readers, and after finishing I kept thinking what a great time a book club could have spending an evening dissecting the characters, mother-daughter-granddaughter relationships, the enormous and life-changing choices made, and the ripples that continue from them. Consider this my recommendation from behind the cyber-counter, I'm handing you this book in full confidence!

So many things I loved about this book

There are so many things I love about this novel. Like Sylvia's separate but echoing stories of her childhood and her adulthood, which are beautifully blended and woven together. And like Ostermiller's descriptions of intense moments caught in time - young Sylvie's mother curled in the patch of sunlight on the rug in the empty yellow room. I think the real genius of this book is the way the author captures the complexity of family life - the parallel, non-intersecting domestic conversations, the not-listening, the missed cues and unanswered pleas. Ultimately though, this poignant and compelling novel left me with a profound sense of connection between people, a hopeful and empathic portrait of family and community.