The Big Girls
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Helen is serving a life sentence at Sloatsburg women's prison for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, is the new chief of psychiatry there. Captain Ike Bradshaw is the corrections officer who wants her. And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by Helen, is intent on nothing but fame. Drawing these four characters together in a story of shocking and disturbing revelations, The Big Girls is an electrifying novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of maternal instinct, and the cult of celebrity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In spare yet hypnotic prose, Moore (One Last Look) examines the bond between a young psychiatrist and a mentally ill patient in her devastating sixth novel, set at an upstate New York federal women's prison. Sloatsburg Correctional Institution, a former sanitarium on the west bank of the Hudson, is dangerous, understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmingly grim. The place epitomizes what's wrong with our nation's prison system and stands as a warning about our growing mental health crisis. Moore deftly shifts perspective among her principal characters Dr. Louise Forrest, Sloatsburg's psychiatry chief; Helen Nash, a suicidal inmate who's been convicted of killing her children; Capt. Henry "Ike" Bradshaw, a corrections officer who's in love with Louise; and Angie Mills, a Hollywood actress (and Louise's ex-husband's girlfriend), whom Helen believes is her long-lost sister as the action hurtles to an oddly satisfying resolution. Reading this heartbreaker is like watching a train wreck while dialing for help on your cellphone. You can't turn away. 75,000 printing; author tour.
