Retrato do autor

Katie Arnoldi

Autor(a) de Chemical Pink

5 Works 140 Membros 4 Críticas

About the Author

Includes the name: Kate Arnoldi

Obras por Katie Arnoldi

Chemical Pink (2001) 74 exemplares
The Wentworths (2008) 41 exemplares
Point Dume: A Novel (2010) 22 exemplares
Química rosa (Spanish Edition) (2019) 2 exemplares
Kehonpalvoja (2011) 1 exemplar

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1959-02-24
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
USA

Membros

Críticas

Point Dume is less about marijuana growing on public lands than about the personal conflicts and problems of people living in a changing California ocean community. That's unfortunate because I thought the pot growing aspect of the book was far more interesting than the lives of the US-based characters. I felt like I'd already met them in books and movies past.

The book read quickly and easily, perhaps in part because everything felt so familiar, but it would have felt much more satisfying if Arnoldi hadn't spent so many of her pages on back story. The last quarter or third of the book is the most compelling, when the plot focuses less on soapy and satirical stuff and more on various aspects of survival. Like some other readers, I thought the most interesting character, an illegal Mexican worker who gets lonely tending cartel pot plants, got short shrift.

(Overlook provided me with a copy of the book.)

I wrote about Point Dume on my blog, here.
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Assinalado
LizoksBooks | Dec 15, 2018 |
August Wentworth: The patriarch, who drinks, cheats on his wife and thinks all women are after him, even at his age.

Judith Wentworth: The matriarch who cares more about appearances than her family’s needs.

Conrad Wentworth: The eldest son and cruel womanizer.

Rebecca Wentworth-Jones: The uptight daughter who needs pills just to get through the day.

Norman Wentworth: The homosexual, cross-dressing youngest son who hates his family for their lack of acceptance.

Paul Jones: The attention-starved son-in-law who is afraid to speak up.

Monica: The teenage, drug using granddaughter who thinks she’s smarter than everyone.

Little Joey: The grandson who is a kleptomaniac and doesn’t’ see anything wrong with it.

You’ve just met the Wentworths. A rich, spoiled, southern California family as dysfunctional as they come.

Katie Arnoldi’s THE WENTWORTHS is a bold, dark, erotic story of an elite rich family. Some have called it a satire, but that would mean that it was funny or makes fun of the people or their lives. It did do that to an extent, but as I read on I found it more disturbing than anything. I'm no prude and I do like dark comedy, but I would be more likely to label it sadistic. There were a few funny lines early on, but not enough to label it humorous, in my opinion.

The story is told in the first person by each member of the family, along with a few outsiders. It’s easy to tell whose perspective you’re reading by the varying personalities and the quirky titles of each chapter. The chapters are very short, sometimes only a page, which gives the book a choppy feel. It’s not a novel that flows with dialogue. Basically, the story is about a woman who first tries to worm her way into the family with no luck then tries to teach Conrad a lesson. It’s also about how this family reacts to even the most mundane happenings, such as Judith’s obsession with finding missing silver tongs from a tea set.

To be honest, this book was just ok for me. After I finished it, there just wasn’t much I was left with. And nothing really started to happen until the last 50 or so pages. A lot of time was spent explaining the personalities of the characters and how, in they’re own words, they felt about each other.

I understand Ms. Arnoldi’s first novel, CHEMICAL PINK was a surprise cult hit and I’ve read there’s talk of a screenplay. I’m sure there will be a similar following for this latest release. It’s not a book for everyone, but if you’re in the mood for bold, explicit, R-rated fiction, this is the book for you.
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Assinalado
SouthernGirlReads | 1 outra crítica | Jul 10, 2008 |
With The Wentworths Katie Arnoldi has penned a vicious satire of the upper class. Dysfunctional barely begins to describe the Wentworth family. August, the patriarch, has barely been faithful to his wife for a moment in their lengthy marriage. Judith, however, is so caught up with the myriad of beautiful things and the power over a small army of maids she has accumulated as a result of her marriage to August that she couldn't care less where August chooses to spend his time. Their three children are even more twisted than their parents. Conrad is an expensive lawyer whose wildly sadistic side is revealed early in his life. Their one daughter, Becky, after being stung by a comment made by her father during her youth is obsessed with controlling her weight leaving little time for her meek husband, Paul, and her two children Monica (a drug addict) and Joey (a shameless kleptomaniac). Finally, there is gay Norman, who by his mid-thirties has failed to so much as move from his parents' guest house but, for the most part, is too stoned to care.

Throughout the novel, Arnoldi makes this elite family downright laughable by revealing their problems and insecurities while at the same time using everyday occurrences to showcase their ridiculous responses to the mundane. Judith's quest to recover a set of missing sugar tongs spotlights the Wenthworths' pure inanity. She grills each family member about the whereabouts of the tongs while the many real problems this family faces have a blind eye turned to them. Arnoldi brilliantly renders this family's inability to deal with its many problems, and even more so, its unwillingness to even admit that there are problems at all.

Though it seems that Arnoldi succeeds admirably in what I imagine to be her quest to satirize the type of people who quite literally have more money than they know what to do with, this book was nonetheless a difficult read. Short, sometimes wittily named chapters contain the astonishing, twisted, and often very explicit foibles of the family members. While I don't consider myself to be too faint of heart, I found myself agape at many of the events taking place in the pages of this book. As a result, I found The Wentworths to be all too easy to put down making a lengthy read out of a very short book. While I can appreciate Arnoldi's message, such as it is, her means of revealing it in this novel was almost more than I could take.
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Assinalado
yourotherleft | 1 outra crítica | Mar 12, 2008 |
I saw this book mentioned on Kat Ricker's website.

I hated this book. Instead of being about how empowering weight training can be for a female it was a cautionary tale about losing site of the true goal of fitness. Of course the whole book is all about eat massive/train massive because the main character is using AAS. It's never explained that naturals can't do that. Elzi wrote a nice article about this. AND she managed to not be judgmental about it.

The moral of the story? Girls who take AAS are clueless puppets. Girls who take AAS are narcissistic whores who deserve to lose their children. And the men who find them attractive are perverts.

Somehow I don't think it's that simple. That black & white. Supplementation has a lot of gray areas IMHO. I don't think it's our place to judge people who use AAS as long as they are educated about the risks.


"He'd train me for an hour and a half. Made me cry on forced reps. I'd usually throw up on leg day." Aurora looked at Charles. "It was fantastic. Then I'd go to work. I was so sore, sometimes, I couldn't even lift my daughter. It was so great watching my body change."

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath opened her eyes, looked in the mirror and pulled her body up into the first chin. It was tight and perfect, head back, elbows pulled behind, chest touching the bar at the top of the movement.
"Nice," Hendrik said. "Thirty like that."
Aurora closed her eyes and focused. At rep six, her chest didin't quite touch the bar and her feet had come undone; at eleven she only got three quarters of the way up, kicking in her effort and her arms were quivering.
"Pitiful." Hendrick grabbed her around the waist and helped lift her into a full chin. "We do twenty-five more. Concentrate."
Aurora pulled as hard as she could, her pain turning into anger, and somehow, with his help, finished the thirty-seven repetitions. When she dropped to the ground, her back felt numb, her hands frozen in the shape of the bar. She felt dizzy and her arms hung useless at her side.
"That was the warm-up. Come." Hendrick walked away, leaving Aurora to carry her bag and his.

Aurora's legs looked Superhero-hard when she flexed them, shredded and beautiful. Humans weren't supposed to look like this but she did.

I say give this book a pass. Okay maybe if you find it for 50cents at a garage sale. But even then it's probably not worth your time. Even the sex is neither erotic or even pornographic, just sick.
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Assinalado
Clueless | Jan 31, 2008 |

Estatísticas

Obras
5
Membros
140
Popularidade
#146,473
Avaliação
2.8
Críticas
4
ISBN
14
Línguas
2

Tabelas & Gráficos