Bad Marie
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Reading Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie is like spending a rainy afternoon in a smaller, older movie theater watching a charming French movie with a woman (or a man) you’ve just met on the street and already like far too much. It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” — Frederick Barthelme
“Dermansky excels at depicting extreme emotional states and how we rationalize them.” —Village Voice
From the critically-acclaimed author of Twins, Marcy Dermansky, comes a highly original novel of Manhattan, Paris, and Mexico; of love and motherhood; and of life on the lam. Fans of Heather O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals) and A.M. Homes (Music for Torching) will revel in the wicked delights of Bad Marie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dermansky follows her lauded debut, Twins, with a trite tail about an ex-con's unlikely re-entry to the world. After serving six years for harboring a fugitive her bank robber boyfriend 30-year-old Marie is released and misses the decisionless ease of prison life. She finds work as a live-in nanny (nothing like a felon watching your pride and joy) for two-and-a-half-year-old Caitlin, the daughter of her childhood best friend, Ellen, with whom she has a rocky, competitive relationship. In a hard-to-believe coincidence, Ellen is married to the French author, Beno t Doniel, whose book Marie read repeatedly while in prison, and soon enough, Beno t and Marie kick off an affair and decide to run away to Paris together with Caitlin. But when Beno t's true colors are displayed before even landing in the City of Lights (thanks to another unbelievable coincidence), Marie finds herself taking on the role of a single mother in a strange land, though her travails never really impede on her relatively charmed streak. It's off-putting how heavily the plot relies on implausible twists, and Marie is too sketchily drawn to carry the full weight of the story.
