compelling story of escape, avoidance, family and much more ( )

This was an interesting read! I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in Bonnie's Op Shop, I had no idea the movie that came out in the late 00's was based on a book.
We follow the story of Ann & her single-mother Adele as they make their way across America from Wisconsin to California so Ann can become a child star before it's too late.
At the beginning of the book, I felt really sorry for Ann as she's subjected to Adele's flighty ways & whims. Actually I felt sorry for her through most of the book because you get the sense that Ann doesn't really get much of a say in the decision making process. She just blindly follows her Mum as kids do because she's her mum. And as the story unfolds I was left wondering what happened to Adele to make her so flighty & hare-brained. I never really figured that out...
Through the first half of the story I felt really displaced as Ann would bounce back & forth between her childhood in Wisconsin & the present in California. Later on things start to fall into place but it wasn't until the last quarter of the story I actually started to feel a bit more comfortable & understand the hows & whys of the story.
Anyway, as stories go, even though it made me extremely uncomfortable it's a good story & really is a good eaxmple of family life if a little over dramatic.

Read during Spring 2002

I don't understand the reviews on the cover that said 'funny'. More tragic and disturbing. The different points of view was an interesting way to tell the story but Ann's story is really the most interesting one and Carol's narratives can be disruptive, even if they fill in the blanks. It seemed to complete peter out at the end but the final 3 or 4 pages of Adele's narrative blindsided me. She is a difficult character and I didn't find anything sympathetic in her, although I think I was supposed. Promising but didn't quite make it. This is the first book I released through Book Crossing.....

I've had this book for years and decided to read it cause it was in Nancy Pearl's Book Lust. There were some parts that were okay, but I wasn't a huge fan of this book. The mother, Adele August, drove me nuts! I hated this woman and I've seen women similar to her in real-life! A girl back in high school did an essay/project on it and she thought it was funny. I didn't find it to be really funny at all, and I was expecting it to be a bit different. ( )

Half the dysfunction STILL would have been too much. This book was such a downer. Adele, the mother, was a complete flake. Ann, her daughter, always overcomes--somehow or other. Author sometimes abruptly changes the course of action. There were several times I thought I had turned ,multiple pages and lost the plot line, but no. I was reading consecutive pages, just another random plot twist from nowhere. ( )