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Pearl

By: Mary Gordon
Narrated by: Kymberli Colbourne
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Summary

On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics - nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself? Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl's surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl's side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland's tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
©2005 Mary Gordon (P)2010 Audible, Inc
Fiction Literary Fiction Ireland
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Profile Image for MS REBECCA WARREN

Its About Loss

I liked this book, not sure if I would have read it as well as I had listened. I identified with Maria and just thank my lucky stars that my daughter never chained herself to a railing. I enjoyed the introspection and had to keep reminding myself that Pearl was very young. This is not what I would call chick lit unless it made a few hundred people listen.
Mary Gordon should have done more research on, safeguarding, mental capacity and deprivation of liberty issues in the republic of Ireland before tying Pearl to the bed and be aware that a urinary catheter is inserted into the urethra not into the vagina. The nursing and medical bits that were way off reality annoyed me, the rest was fabulous.

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