The Humpty Dumptys

by Greta Sherman

Overview

Five daughters learn to cope with daily beatings, berating, and starvation at the hands of their mentally ill mother, but they carry deep scares into adulthood.

When their mother is discovered bludgeoned to death they are the only suspects.

Eva, the oldest, is the nurturer who lives in close proximity to her mother and is well past trying to act as if everything is normal. Hedy is a powerful advertising executive who has run from her past by working eighty hour weeks and hiding the fact she lives with a woman. Lily copes by ignoring everything-her childhood, her marriage, and her happiness. Sophie waits and lives in a world of denial while taking care of her brain damaged twin sister, Patty, who was robbed of her genius level intelligence when her mother hit her in the head with a nine iron.

The Humpty Dumptys is a riveting piece of fiction that examines the realities of what happens when you break children through abuse and how only some can ultimately find happiness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990808800
Publisher:	L'Oeuf Publishing Company
Publication date:	09/26/2014
Series:	Egg , #1
Pages:	478
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Greta Sherman is a retired advertising agency executive with over thirty-five years' experience in the fields of journalism, marketing and advertising. She is a highly regarded international public speaker on a variety of topics including the Affordable Care Act, child abuse, and generational differences. Greta graduated from the University of Kentucky in Lexington with a bachelor's degree in general studies concentrating in journalism and political science. She was reared in rural Kentucky with her four sisters and now makes her home in Louisville, Kentucky, with her partner, Trisha, and their dog Jack. She has lived in multiple US cities and often visits Singapore where her son, Jay, his wife, Archana, and their young daughter, Maya, live and work.

Editorial Reviews

2014-11-04
Sherman's debut novel explores how abuse takes its toll on children, even long after they become adults.The five Anderson sisters—Eva, Hedy, Lily, Sophie and Patty—grew up with an abusive mother and alcoholic father in small, rural Hardinsburg, Kentucky. Despite their traumatic youth and its ensuing psychological effects, the sisters have remained "strangely loyal to one another, almost a single unit," even into adulthood. As the book opens, the sisters convene to begin their biannual tradition of cleaning their mentally ill mother's yard at the end of the autumn season. The task goes according to plan until Sophie goes inside her mother's home to find her murdered on the couch, stabbed through the neck. The ensuing police investigation reveals that one of the sisters committed the crime, and soon both the family and the public must deal with the complex reality of what's occurred. This harrowing look at child abuse graphically describes how the sisters' mother physically and psychologically tormented them; for example, she left them alone in a playpen all day, withheld food, and even killed the family dog in front of them. The novel explores complex, relevant themes, including the nature of guilt (particularly in cases of revenge), the ways that adults cope with childhood trauma, and in Hedy's story, the difficulties of being gay in a closed-minded community. Sherman also offers an inventive narrative structure, telling the story from the third-person perspectives of several main characters. Despite its strengths, however, the book is overlong, and often hampered by irrelevant information; for example, the first chapter includes a large amount of medical and advertising jargon that never becomes pertinent later.A heartbreaking tale about a family ripped apart by mental illness and abuse, but one that might have been better condensed.

Kirkus Reviews