The Soft Room

by Karen Heuler

Book Overview

"Karen Heuler's THE SOFT ROOM starts with a provocative

premise and twists its way into unexpected territory. Exploring

the meaning of pain and duality, her characters end up in a

weirdly life-affirming landscape-the shape morality takes when

faced with cruelty and senseless harm. Heuler's writing is clear

and thoughtful, and as full of surprises as her story. She has a gift

for the oblique, a quirky take on...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931982325
• ISBN13: 9781931982320
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Livingston Press at the University of West Al
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

two part invention

A twin pleasure!From the divided self to neighbors make good fences, Karen Heuler's The Soft Room makes heart and brain race to turn the next page.

Exploration of pain

The Soft Room is based on a clever plot involving twin sisters Abigail and Megan. Though they are identical, there is one big difference. Megan is born with a rare disease that causes her to feel no pain. In the hands of a lesser writer, this plot could easily have turned predictable, but Heuler's writing is anything but predictable. This is a story about how something that everyone takes for granted--that is, the ability to feel physical pain--can, by its absence also cause a person to feel such disattachment to the human condition that they also suffer the grief of being unable to experience emotional pain. I found this novel dark and disturbing. At times it had the feel of something Stephen King might have come up with, and that is certainly a compliment in this reader's opinion. If you enjoy exploring the darker sides of the human condition, then you will find this book to your liking. A fine novel, and worth the time and money invested. I give it five stars.

A Wondrous Novel that Explores and Celebrates Individuality

Karen Heuler arrives on the fiction novel scene with excellent credentials as a short story writer. It is rewarding to read such a fine extended novel from a writer who has specialized in the terse, concise, brief span of the short story mode: many who excel in that arena find the challenge of a long novel daunting. Not Karen Heuler. From the original concept of a novel about identical twin girls whose only apparent disparity is the analgia (inability to feel pain) of Meg, a 'defect?' which twin Abby does not share, Heuler has opened the bestiary of life at large and introduces fascinating character after character, each of whom comes to figure in the endlessly creative drama that unfolds. The twins' parents devote their lives to protecting Meg from harm, creating a 'safe' environment that Meg brazenly ignores only to be victim to falls, cuts, bruises, fractures, and deformed limbs despite the omnipresent guardianship of her identical other, Abby. The family's ability to survive this bizarre scientific variant is further complicated by the mother falling victim to a virulent cancer, a twist of fate that further burdens the finances of the family, ultimately forcing the father to move his family to the Institute where researchers welcome the ability to study Meg as a guinea pig while providing the mother with medical care. Life at the Institute includes at least one new friend, Greif, a girl whose mother has a genetic propensity to madness, a gene Greif assures the twins she will inherit. That friendship provides ventures into the dark interstices of the research facilities of the Institute where the girls are made aware of animal experiments on human disease states. Of note, the agonizing pain the twins' mother feels in response to her disease state and chemotherapy serve only as a trigger to make Meg flee the 'un-understood' pain of her mother. After the mother's eventual death and the re-marriage of the father, Abby and Meg drift apart: being unable to live without each identical other ultimately results in strains neither can endure. Abby marries and leads a normal home life , collecting cats and dogs, and aberrant needy homeless children in her workplace while Meg returns to the Institute to serve as a research assistant. Meg herself begins occult-type treatments for her analgia in the form of injections and medications by one of the staff researchers. By other twists of coincidence Meg, Greif and Abby reunite and discover their true individualities in a most absorbing and mysterious ending. If this all sounds rather odd - well, it is, and therein lies the magic of Karen Heuler. Not only does she paint her characters with such realism that we can see them on the page and in the room around us, she also surveys psychological, medical, genetic, and scientific issues with such clarity that reading her book informs as well as entertains. "Science is a great adventure; so much is still undiscovered. Every autopsy, every microscope sl