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Synopsis
Helen is serving a life sentence at Sloatsburg women's prison for the murder of her children.
Dr. Louise Forrest, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, is the new chief of psychiatry there.
Captain Ike Bradshaw is the corrections officer who wants her.
And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by Helen, is intent on nothing but fame.
Drawing these four characters together in a story of shocking and disturbing revelations, The Big Girls is an electrifying novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of maternal instinct, and the cult of celebrity.
The New York Times - Stacey D'Erasmo
… as riveting as the body count can be, it can overshadow Moore s subtler, more quietly lacerating talents. She has a pitch-perfect ear for the vernacular, for moving character detail and for the kind of bloodless savagery that the ravenous appetite for fame produces, as when Angie guilelessly explains, Rafael makes perfect sense at this point when I m making that important transition from TV star to artist. Moore is quite funny and, particularly in her nuanced portrait of the tragic Helen, she is capable of the sort of empathy that encompasses the full range, for good and ill, of being human. It didn t turn out very good, I know, Helen says, but I tried my best. With pity and tenderness, one believes her, and her sliver of hapless self-knowledge after the irrevocable fact cuts deeper, perhaps, than the more spectacular crimes that both sever and bind the haunted characters who populate this dreamy prison.