From the Library: The Big Girls

Last week I finished reading "The Big Girls" by Susanna Moore.  This book follows a psychiatrist as she adjusts to her new job at a woman's prison where she looks after the psychological issues that caused women to commit crimes in the first place or are a result from being locked up.  Most of the book centers on one client who is incarcerated for killing her children.  The client's abuse from her stepfather and her husband is revealed slowly throughout the book as is her relationship with the woman who is now the live-in lover of the psychologist's ex-husband and father of her son.

This is a book of big characters.  Well-written to keep you involved in the on-going story while alternately caring of and disgusted by the people who inhabit this book, I am reading another of Susanna Moore's books by audiobook in the car.  What a writer!

I found "The Big Girls" to be a big slice of life, not necessary a life that I would want to inhabit, but life, nonetheless.  The characters do the stupid things that real people do.  Other characters react in the unpredictable way that people do.  There is no happy ending, maybe not even an ending, just as life, there is on-going living, where compromise and make do are the trail that characters follow.

I recommend this book, because it allows a giant keyhole to observe a corner of the world that is so different from any other.