Shirley Curran
Carol Topolski’s Monster Love is extremely disturbing from beginning to end. Unfortunately, the central event is all too familiar. A child is abused, neglected and ultimately starved to death. How could this tabloid horror be the subject of a novel? And one of the current 10 best sellers?
Carol Topolski is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Perhaps that is why each of the narratives in the story rings so true. We hear the voices of the parents, the policeman who found the decaying corpse, the grandparents, a busybody neighbour and a host of others.
Each of them participated in some way in the horror and, for all of them, nothing will ever be the same again.
The picture is slowly fitted together and the horrible truth is that we understand even the evil couple who gave birth to Samantha. This book is gripping but not to be mistaken for an easy read. Don’t give it to your grandmother!
GenevaLunch, 10 November 2008.
Filed under: Society
Tags: books, Carol Tpolski Monster Love, Chilling tabloid-style murder, Community, Health and Fitness, Media, Society
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November 25th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Get reala1 I’m a grandmother several times over, read the book, found it passable, but didn’t like the ending! The adoring couple got together happily??? Ugh!!
November 25th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Thank you so much for your comment on my ‘Monster Love’ blog. I really appreciated your reaction – the ‘Ugh’ was exactly how I felt as I read the text. I have just commented to our editor that your verdict on the end of the novel was most fair and appropriate. Why should this nasty couple be allowed, by the author, to be ‘reunited’ in that way. Though, in reality, mutual suicide in a British prison is not a pleasant fate. Of course, in a mini review, it would have been inappropriate for me to hint at the ending.
Indeed ‘passble’ is also a fair verdict as the novel does examine the way the revolting situation spreads its tentacles wide and ruins the lives of more than the little victim.
I am shocked to the core, as I am sure you, as a several times over grandmother, are, to find that this dreadful situation has occurred again in the UK with the appalling murder of Baby P in Haringay. What horrible instinct prompted me to do a blog on ‘Monster Love’ just now and why is it on all the ‘best-seller’ shelves in the UK?