A Heart of Stone
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A Heart of Stone
by Authors:
Renate Dorrestein , Hester Velmans
Released: 01 January, 2002
ISBN: 014200023X
Paperback
Sales Rank: 175,345
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List price:
$13.00
Our price:
$9.75
(You save: $3.25)
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| Book > A Heart of Stone > Customer Reviews: |
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Average Customer Rating: 
A Heart of Stone >
Customer Review #1:
Kelsey Lin Book Review
The Book A Heart of Stone by Renate Dorrestein is a beautifully written book. This book takes you into a chilling tale of murder, love, and betrayal. A family that was lost because of the fifth child and a mothers insanity due to post mortem distress. This riveting tale grabs the readers attention and never lets go until the end of the book. It is just impossible to put down once you get into it. The book is mainly about the narrator and her journey to figure out what and why this had to happen to her family? And why her mother did it. This unsettling tale takes you through the good times and the bad times of the narrators past and her present. The narrator who is a thirty five year old woman now is just finding out what really happened to her and her family as a young girl of twelve. It all came crashing down one night when she came home after storming off because she and her mother got into a fight. She walked in the door and her oldest sister and brother were lying on the table dead with bags wrapped around their heads. Their mother had strangled them. Her youngest brother was still alive but just barley. She was able to save him. He was her only relative left. Later he was adopted, she never knows what happened to him, and she doubts that if they passed on the street they wouldnt even recognize each other. When Ellen (narrators name) moves back into her childhood home she begins to remember her past. As she looks into every room she start to remember the happier times of her life, and some not so happy. She starts to remember all the tales of her childhood, each memory replayed in scrupulous detail. The book switches from present day to her past. Every memory is replayed out of order so the reader has to place them. In the beginning she tells tales of the happy memories of her family like the good times. She also tells sad memories or memories of her and her mother fighting. Ellen tends to switch from present to past very quietly so in the very first pages it gets sort of confusing. Once the reader gets into the book no deeper than forty pages you just cant put it down. It is a very powerful tale of the perfect family coming to its untimely end. You begin to cherish what you have and feel for her family. Ellen is a very observant and she has a good heart. Sometimes she and her mother get into fights. Sometimes she gets into fights with her older siblings. When Ellen is older she must go through years and years of therapy, because of her traumatic childhood. Once she moves into her old home she finds herself playing the blame game like so many times before. She begins to recall that dreadful night and wonders many times why wasnt she killed? She finally has the strength to recall the night in full detail, everything that happened. At the end of the book she finally figures out that the only reason she isnt dead was because her mother forgot her. She had to many things to think about, it just slipped her mind. This powerful tale of a families tragic end is one of the best written books I have read. It leaves you speechles
A Heart of Stone >
Customer Review #2:
The Gothic novel is not only alive, it¿s been improved!
This terrifying, bone-chilling novel does not depend on mere events, no matter how horrific, for its stunning effects. Dorrestein is much too clever a writer for that. Instead, she recreates with great psychological astuteness the inner workings of main character Ellen Van Bemmels mind, revealing her memories from the age of twelve to adulthood in a seemingly random sequence, as Ellen allows herself first to remember, and later accept, the unimaginable trauma she has experienced as a child. This trauma is made even more dramatic for the reader because it contrasts so starkly with lovely vignettes of the large, happy family we admire and feel part of in the beginning of the book. Ellens siblings--sister Billie, brother Kester, and Michael, nicknamed Carlos-- are in every way delightful, normal children, experiencing the same joys and humorous adventures that most readers will have experienced, with parents who are so in love they can hardly keep their hands off each other. It is easy to admire, and even envy, such a family.And then the idyll abruptly ends, and we dont know exactly how or why. Slowly, inexorably, details are revealed which put Ellens current life into perspective. A 37-year-old single woman, recently divorced and pregnant as a result of a brief encounter, Ellen has purchased the house where disaster long ago struck her family, and there she awaits the birth of her baby and thinks about the past. This past takes on added poignancy since it was the birth of her youngest sibling that triggered the events that destroyed Ellens world. Dorrestein is the consummate literary juggler here as she throws Ellens innumerable memories, partial memories, and suspicions into the air of her story and manages to keep them all suspended until the heart-stopping, breath-taking conclusion. Im sure many readers will feel compelled to keep reading this book well into the night--the agony of finding out the details so slowly is more than some of us are willing to bear. A most delicious horror story, especially memorable because Ellen seems so like ourselves.
A Heart of Stone >
Customer Review #3:
Dutch psychological thriller
A heart of stone
Dutch psychological thriller
Hard to say much about this book without giving too much away, but suffice to say that a previously perfect family inexorably begins to fall apart with the birth of Ida, the fifth child, who suffers from strange and recurrent injuries. Is Mom, who seems to be slowly going mad, causing the troubles?
The story is told partly in retrospect when Ella, the third child, returns to her childhood home, turns the pages of a family album, and begins to remember?
Helluva good tale.
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A Heart of Stone >
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