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Cavedweller
Paperback Nova Audio Books Product Details |
Amazon.com Review
"Death changes everything." So begins Dorothy Allison's sprawling, ambitious, and deeply satisfying second novel, Cavedweller. For Delia Byrd, Randall Pritchard's death in a motorcycle accident launches a journey of several thousand miles and almost two decades, a rebirth of sorts that's also a return to her roots. Years before, the handsome but untrustworthy rock star Randall helped Delia flee an abusive husband; Delia escapes physical danger but leaves her two small children behind. In California, her abandoned daughters haunt her dreams and preoccupy her waking hours, even as she sings in Randall's band and gives birth to another daughter, Cissy. But when Randall is killed in a motorcycle accident, Delia packs rebellious Cissy into a broken-down Datsun, bound for Cayro, Georgia, and the one thing that suddenly matters more than anything else: her abandoned children and the chance to be a mother to them once again. Cayro's poverty is emotional as well as material; the town is a hard place, full of hard people. To them, Delia will always be "that bitch" who abandoned her babies, "that hippie" living a life of sin. Nonetheless, Delia forges a cruel bargain with her former husband: in exchange for Delia's agreeing to care for him as he dies, he gives her a chance to reclaim her daughters. Like Bastard out of Carolina, Allison's acclaimed debut novel, Cavedweller is a chronicle of rage, strength, and survival. Here, however, Allison is equally concerned with the redemptive power of love and forgiveness, and a novel that began with death ends on an unexpectedly sanguine note: "'Yes, it's time for some new songs.'" There are no victims in Dorothy Allison's work; Delia triumphs through sheer force of will, bringing her family together despite the contempt of almost everyone around her. The novel has its flaws--including occasionally flat-footed prose--but it is in the end compulsively readable, and it's populated by some of the most memorable characters in recent fiction: tough, prickly, flawed, and deeply human, Delia and Cissy are literary creations of the first rank. In describing the complicated emotions that bind and divide them, Allison demonstrates a profoundly unsentimental understanding of the way the human heart works. Cavedweller is the work of a mature artist, her best fiction to date.
Product Description
When Delia Byrd packs her car and begins the long trip home from the rock & roll business and LA, she heads to Cayro, Georgia, and her past. Ten years earlier, she had left the husband who turned on her, abandoned her two daughters, and fled to California. But Delia is pulled back to Georgia -- to a world of convenience stores and kudzu, of biscuit factories and deeply-rooted Baptism - to make a deal with the man she paid a high price to leave. She brings her third daughter, Cissy, with her.
As the lives of Delia, Cissy, Amanda and Dede converge, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that brings all four women to terms with themselves and with one another. Written by one of America's great storytellers, "Cavedweller" is a sweeping novel of the human spirit that maps a world of "lost" and "known" caves, the unexplored recesses of the heart, and the lives of four women at a place where violence, and what redeems it, intersect.
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Cavedweller
- Audio Cassette: 0 pages (1998-11-01)
- Publisher: Paperback Nova Audio Books; 1998-11-01
- Label: Paperback Nova Audio Books
- Format: Abridged, Audiobook
- Studio: Paperback Nova Audio Books
- ISBN: 1567402801
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 63 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #2874743
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not impressed. 2008-02-06
Comment: I am a first time reader of Dorothy Allison, and I was not at all impressed with this novel. I sort of struggled through it, forced myself to finish it.
The first thing I noticed was all the characters' personalities kind of melted together, the dialogue did not provide them with individual voices, poor character development. The girls as children spoke just the same as the adults - clearly not age appropriate language.
New characters continually appeared, which made me stumble. And so many important scenes of real ACTION were left out and just referred to! Just when I thought we were getting to the good stuff.
And lastly, the novel could be dirtier. 400+ pages and only allusions to sex? Please.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: blah 2006-05-04
Comment: Bought this on a clearance rack and can now see why it hadn't sold. The characters were unexciting, and the story dragged on and on. I read 4 books while having this one unfinished on my night stand. I've never read any of Allison's other novels, but after reading this one, I don't think I'll jump on the chance. Dede was the most interesting character, and even she couldn't keep me involved.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Let's get to the Point of this Book... 2006-04-06
Comment: Another "Top of the list". The first 50-75 pgs were a little slow, but then I didn't want to put it down!
The way the story weaves the lives of Mom and daughter, leaving the life they knew in CA behind, to search the two daughters left behind in GA... is sad, intriguing, cryptic and dynamic all in one!
Recommended, just to see how the lives of the women of Cayro, Georgia come out on Top, together!!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Meandering yet heartfelt (and recognizably "real") group portrait of a mother and her three daughters 2006-01-21
Comment: "Caveweller," Dorothy Allison's second novel, is nearly overwhelmed by the number of stories it relates. Yet somehow Allison holds everything together in this deeply collective portrait of a mother and her three daughters and the often troubled, sometimes impoverished lives they lead.
The novel has the feel of a multigenerational saga, but its span is barely a decade (with a few flashbacks to an earlier era). A trilogy of sorts, the book presents a series of interrelated family crises; its tragedies and triumphs occur at seemingly random and usually unexpected moments. Newly widowed, Delia Byrd, a recovering singer from a briefly famous rock band, flees with her daughter Cissy to her hometown in Georgia and attempts to reconcile herself with the two daughters she left to a violent husband from an earlier marriage. A claustrophobic tension permeates the resulting relationships: the townsfolk despise this prodigal woman who "abandoned" her daughters for a spin in the limelight; Cissy is homesick for her friends in the fast life in Los Angeles; Delia's first husband is dying of cancer; and her two daughters, with the support of their grandmother, despise and ignore the mother they never knew.
Then the novel shifts both perspective and gears, slowing down quite a bit to focus on the journey through adolescence by Delia's three daughters. Cissy discovers the escapist joy of spelunking, exploring the dark wombs of local caves and losing herself in the odd comfort of pitch-blackness. Her two sisters, the religiously righteous Amanda and the amorally rebellious Dede, confront emotional upheavals that challenge the extremes of their worldviews. And hovering in the background are neighborhood women who offer guidance and love to the four women, as well as humor and insight to the reader.
Fleeting fame, domestic violence, rural poverty, troubled romance, moral ambiguity, Southern life, and a veneer of folk rock--Allison is so casual about linking her themes and her stories, that there are moments (particular after the climatic "resolution" of Delia's homecoming) that the book almost doesn't cohere. Meandering, yes; unfocused, perhaps--but I suppose, so is life, and there is no denying the recognizable realness of the four lead characters. And, in the end, everything comes together, surprisingly yet satisfyingly.
0 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time on this book 2005-07-10
Comment: Ugh! This book was a gift, so of course I read it. Don't waste your time! I read it a year ago and it still sticks in my head as one of the worst books I have read in quite some time.
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