Breaking Out of Bedlam: A Novel Review

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Breaking Out of Bedlam: A Novel Review
At eighty-two, Cora Sledge's worst nightmare has come true. Obese, drug-addled and cantankerous, Cora's rabid independence is struck a fatal blow when her three adult children descend upon her filthy house, discovering a refrigerator filled with moldering food and hidden caches of pills, Cora's lifestyle grown more troubling with each passing year. Cowed by her children's outrage and disgust, Cora is soon ensconced in The Palisades, an assisted living facility that is little more than a concrete bunker for housing the elderly. Institutionalization at its most frightening, Cora's place at The Palisades consists of a small room and bath, the sliding glass door on one wall offering a view of the loading docks and a steady stream of low-paid workers pushing laundry carts back and forth.
But as we learn from the pages of Cora's diary, this is a woman with an indomitable spirit, married at seventeen and hiding a painful secret all the long years of her life. After a few weeks in bed, drugged to insensitivity by the pills she has managed to sneak into the facility, Cora resists the siren call of oblivion as she explores the limitations and conditions at her new home, where "the walkers and wheelchairs make a slow-motion stampede for the dining room" and the halls smell of incontinence and despair. There are few friends here- certainly not her table mate, "Poison Ivy"- but a respiratory therapist offers enough kindness to spark Cora's flagging spirit. Decreasing her drug intake, Cora is inspired to shed the weight as she unburdens her soul of a lifetime of sorrows.
It is difficult to describe this novel: frightening, because what happens to Cora in her old age could happen to any of us; joyful, because her indomitable spirit suggests that regardless of the body's deficiencies, the soul refuses to be extinguished; sad, because Cora is a foolish woman who still believes in love and romance; and uplifting, because the author has distilled the essence of her character into someone the reader can identify with. We learn Cora's deepest secret in the quirky language of a farm girl who moved to Detroit at the height of the Depression and later to sunny California, the blunt remarks of a woman who always speaks her mind and the fears that riddle the old and infirm. Cora is a survivor, spunky, sly and stubborn, up to one more round with the children she raised, determined to finish out her days on her terms before she greets the Grim Reaper. Luan Gaines/2010.
Breaking Out of Bedlam: A Novel Overview

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