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Like Normal People A Novel edition by Karen E Bender Literature Fiction eBooks

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This “luminous, meditative novel on the boundaries between childhood, adulthood, and old age” follows one day in the lives of three generations of women (Entertainment Weekly).
 
Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center Lena is forty-eight years old, but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena’s day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life’s dreams and disappointments her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena’s disability; and her aching attempts to give her daughter a “normal” childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella’s world—but now, she must contemplate the prospect of letting her daughter go.
 
Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, this powerful, emotional story from the author of Refund, a National Book Award finalist, is “an uplifting and bittersweet testament to uncompromising love” (The New York Post).


 

Like Normal People A Novel edition by Karen E Bender Literature Fiction eBooks

The writer has a very realistic style, at the same time she writes descriptively. She includes real life details, which are helpful in making the story an accurate rendition-but sometimes the details were indelicate. (There were a couple descriptions that were kind of comical/kind of gross that I keep remembering). She tells the story of a mother and daughter-the daughter was brain damaged at birth and so had below average intelligence. By the end, the story of the entire (immediate) family is told and we understand the bonds between the mother and daughter as well as between the father and the younger daughter with all the other family members.

Product details File Size 1001 KB Print Length 260 pages Publisher Mariner Books (December 1, 2015) Publication Date June 1, 2018 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B018DWKO3O

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Like Normal People A Novel edition by Karen E Bender Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews

Memorable and searing, crushing and uplifting, messy and profound, Karen Bender's debut novel, "Like Normal People," grabs our attention, mesmerizes us with its incandescent language and imagery, and instructs us to the marvelous, unpredictable and transcendent need for familial love. Its three featured characters deal with profound flaws and disabilities; their enduring quest for understanding, acceptance and place bind them to us. Each protagonist illuminates a family's history; the matriarch, eldest daughter and youngest daughter's daughter bind themselves to each other in a lattice of pain, confusion and ultimate understanding. Singularly and collectively, their lives are messy, unfocused, but true. Like normal people, Ella, Lena and Shelley must confront their lives, and with the resources available to each, accept themselves and learn to cherish each other.
Karen Bender accomplishes these tasks in a telescopic fashion. The retarded Lena has bolted from her assisted living residenced with Shelley; shocked and bewildered, the elderly Ella enlists her other daughter Vivien (Shelley's mother) to help her find them. Their search involves Ella's painstaking review of her life. This cross-cutting, between the past and present, invigorates the narrative and gives depth to brilliant characterizations.
Ella has given her life to her now adult retarded daughter. Possessed with the enormous responsibility of managing a child's life for the rest of her life has both strengthened and weakened Ella. Devotion to her husband has been supplanted by commitment to her needy child. The regular rules of parenting are suspended; Lena's differences become a cruel wedge between Ella and the rest of the world. Even the birth of a "normal" second child, Vivien (whose creative brilliance is balanced by her prescient knowledge that she must be bound by compassion to her older sister), scares Ella that hoping for the future is allowed. This matriarch's strength is shadowed by her ambivalence; when may Ella feel free, independent, autonomous.
Lena presents a different challenge. Ms. Bender has invested her with authentic feelings, but bound those emotions in a retarded mind. Surging with needs, attempting to realize some joy and peace in a fragmented, limited existence, Lena's marriage to Bob serves as the crucible through which the three protagonists come fully alive to each other. Lena is a triumph. Her anguish, her loneliness and her frustrations render her believable and lamentable. Her breakthrough understandings may seem small to "normal people," but emerge as enormous in her self-identity.
The tormented Shelley, gripped by a compulsive need to count in multiples of three, symbolizes the possibilities, anxieties and confusions of early adolescence. Her budding senses of social isolation and incipient sexuality have no outlet other than an intense relationship with her retarded aunt Lena and Lena's retarded husband, Bob. This relationship ultimately results in tragic consequences, and Shelley's guilt and powerlessness (both in accepting responsibility and not being able to alter the past) both energize and immobilize.
As the three characters struggle with their inner torment, they come to separate epiphanies. Ms. Bender's final chapters are elegantly written and extremely moving. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," her three protagonists truly come alive to each other. As Ella, Lena and Shelley learn the truths each needs to continue living, their lives simultaneously expand and contract. Time stops but vision enlarges. This seeming contradiction reinforces the central theme of the novel, that even the best-planned lives of normal people are a mess, that only by opening ourselves to the secrets of our soul and the hidden anguish of our hearts do we become truly human. "Like Normal People" will remain in the reader's consciousness long after the last page is read.
I agree with all the positive reviews but had to add my own because what impressed me the most was the absence of darkness. Here was a family -- imperfect, to be sure -- but their daily acts of heroism were overwhelming to me. The love, the acceptance, the lack of meanness, the lack of shame or embarrassment and above all, the genuine desire by the parents for both of their daughters to be happy and well-adjusted and to be everything they had the potential to be really, really impressed me. I kept waiting for the other dramatic shoe to drop -- for one of the main characters to become an alcoholic, a philanderer, or some kind of psychopath, but it never happened, to my delight. This family struggled through life with good humor and strength. They supported one another in a particularly loving yet respectful way. The mother was somewhat overprotective of her mentally challenged daughter, but who wouldn't be? And over and over again, Lena was able to show her mother that she could handle her own life in her own way, which her mother was then able to accept. At the same time, we were privy to how difficult it was for the mom to do so. How satisfying.

I found the prose at times to be intrusively poetic, as some others have said, but if that is the writer's self-indulgence, I don't mind it because the rewards of the character studies are so great. Imagine someone talented enough to be inside the head of a 12-year-old and an 80-year-old and realistically yet lovingly portray mentally challenged people in their daily lives. I hope Karen Bender's next book brings us back into the lives of the Rose family. I miss them already.
Good family story that encourages strength, and love for one another.
It was disjointed and not easy to follow. Although the author writes well, and I understood where she was coming from, it could have been more smoothly and clearly written.
I ordered this book for an assignment in one of my classes. I did not expect to like the story so much! It was a bittersweet story about three people's lives intertwining with each others- a mother, an adult daughter, and an adolescent granddaughter. What made this story unique is the fact that one of the characters has an intellectual disability. It was a really good story that made me actually feel what the characters in the book were feeling and I was left thinking about them for a few days after I read this book.
The writer has a very realistic style, at the same time she writes descriptively. She includes real life details, which are helpful in making the story an accurate rendition-but sometimes the details were indelicate. (There were a couple descriptions that were kind of comical/kind of gross that I keep remembering). She tells the story of a mother and daughter-the daughter was brain damaged at birth and so had below average intelligence. By the end, the story of the entire (immediate) family is told and we understand the bonds between the mother and daughter as well as between the father and the younger daughter with all the other family members.