Riptide

by Marion Smith

As a therapist, Marion Smith has heard too many stories of families torn apart by child stalkers. In this gripping psychodrama, her heroine is a grandmother who is frustrated by police and church... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560851317
• ISBN13: 9781560851318
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Signature Books
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Delving into the Dark Side

From the moment you begin reading Riptide, you enter the mind of Laurel Greer and don't want to leave. Laurel's inner world is a familiar place for women, yet a strange escape into a very troubled existence. This is a stream-of-consciousness journey through the mind's landscape as Laurel herself drives through Utah hoping to leave it and its traumas behind. The writing is sensitive, colorful and vivid, the insights provocative and original, contemporary without being trendy or self-conscious. This is remarkable when you consider that the author is writing in her 70s. While telling a very personal story, Laurel also engages larger issues in her own, Mormon culture--religous belief, traditional values, loss of faith, and child abuse. Laurel probes disillusionment and devastation created by child abuse, while searching for some kind of inner resolution. Author Marion Smith is a grandmother born and raised in Salt Lake City, yet her book takes us on a tour of the darker side of the female Mormon psyche. Riptide explores the wrenching urges lurking inside of a woman's pain. The narrative follows a woman's feelings of desperation and her attempts to resolve it. Riptide is unique. It honestly excavates the complex layers of child sexual abuse and its real effects on lives; but unlike other abuse memoirs, it examines that struggle within a mother, rather than from the victim's perspective. More intriguing, this story is written in an authentic female voice that confesses the darker side of Mormon culture, as well as woman's own darker nature. Truly a groundbreaking book. Above all, Riptide is a redemptive work. Laurel confesses inner feelings and reactions to the evil in life--her own anger, hatred and desire to destroy that which has destroyed her. In this way, she finds redemption as only one can--by knowing and integrating her own dark side. In this process, Laurel does the very thing that an abuser cannot do for himself, that is, confess the darkness within. Thus, she performs a redemptive act for her own abuser. This book would be interesting to anyone who has ever wrestled with the frustrations of living in a conservative culture.