Purchased at Goodwill in Garland, TX.

Book Description: In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.

Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.

Poor Dolores is faced with every horrible thing a girl could face: abandoned by her father, a mental case mother, rape, bullying, and on and on….

Lamb rolls all of these things into one character so much that it becomes cliched and trite. Throw in the whales and it suddenly feels like dark comedy.

I enjoyed parts of the story and found some of the characters believable, but this book just jumps from one tragedy to another, with large bouts of poor judgment in between. It tries too hard, leaps too much, and ultimately, falls flat.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Left on a chair in the lobby