Customer Reviews

The Book of Fred: A Novel

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When I first began reading A Book of Fred by Abby Bardi, I couldn't imagine how I could come to care about four such eccentric characters so dissimilar to me - a fundamentalist teenager who has been isolated from the modern world; a somewhat dysfunctional and scattered single mom; a sullen teenager with blue-streaked hair; and a man whose sole interests in life seem to be freeloading and watching television. This wonderful first novel reinforces a philosophy I try to live by - do not stereotype! The author quickly and skillfully draws the reader into the complex characters and deepening interrelationships of these four people. I came not only to care about them, but to root and applaud and cheer for them. Told with wit, perception, and near-perfect dialogue, Abby Bardi shapes four distinct lives and weaves them together seamlessly.

It's refreshing to find a book that keeps you up until 2 am, knowing full well that the alarm goes off in less than 4 hours.

Please read this book, love this book, and recommend it to any intelligent person you know - it's a treasure.

To Abby Bardi - more soon, please!

I can't remember the last time I rooted for a character the way I rooted for Mary Fred. Fifteen years old and raised in a Koresh/Ruby Ridge sounding cult, Mary Fred has never seen a talkshow, or the inside of a school, when she's plucked from her true-believing parents and thrust into the thick of the modern world. The story of how she educates her foster family, and how they return the favor, will keep you riveted, break your heart, and give you hope. What a great debut!

The Book of Fred by Abby Bardi is a sympathetic portrayal of the upheaval in 15-year-old Mary Fred's life when she is removed from the isolated fundamentalist sect with which she has lived most of her life and sent to stay with a foster family consisting of single mother, Alice and her teen-aged daughter, Heather.

Mary has been raised in a totally primitive environment and believes devoutly in the divinity of the leader of her sect, Fred. There is a constant culture clash between her and Heather as Mary tries to adhere to the tenets of her faith, and even tries to bend the family's will to her own. She is so certain in the rightness of the way in which she was raised that she cannot see things in any other way. She longs to be able to leave her foster home and go back to the cult.

Ms. Bardi handles Mary's faith and her confusion about her foster family with sympathy and awareness of adolescence. She also handles Heather's embarrassment at her foster sister's strange ways quite realistically. This book will make you think twice about the wisdom of suddenly pulling children from one environment into another without adequately preparing the children for the culture clash. And the book will make you respect Mary Fred who, even when she is confronted with the most irrefutable evidence of the perfidy of Fred, still struggles to find a way to maintain her faith and her beliefs.

Mary Fred, 15 years old, has been raised in a secretive and bizarre cult, the Fredians, whose beliefs were shaped by their prophet, Fred Brown. Alice Cullison is an unhappy divorced Mom, who is trying to hold her family together. Roy, her brother, seems to do nothing but hang out and make bad jokes. Heather Cullison, Alice's daughter, deeply wounded by the divorce, has withdrawn into a shell of sarcasm and defiance. The characters are brought together when Mary Fred's parents are jailed for child neglect and Alice becomes Mary Fred's foster mother. An unlikely combination, with unpredictable results.

Mary Fred is naive to the modern world, has never watched TV, has never been allowed to wear anything but the color brown, and has lived a life of discipline and service. Now what will happen when she is plunged into the very secular, modern, up-to-date but shallow Cullison family? And what will happen to them?

Author Abby Bardi explores this question through a succession of narrators, each of whom takes the story a little farther along. It is a challenging situation for all of them, and all of them will change as a result. But what kind of change? Better or worse? What will happen to Mary Fred? Will she ever get back to her real family? Will she discover who she really is? Read the book and find out!

Author Bardi writes extremely well, in a lucid, conversational style that is easy to follow, and with a great sense of humor. She drew me right into her story. As the book moved toward its conclusion I found myself racing through it. Of course, it is a little far-fetched, and sometimes comes a little close to being over-dramatized, a little too close to sentimentality. Still, it works. Take it for what it is, and you will find the book both entertaining and uplifting. I recommend this one. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

I loved this book! I started it last night and could not bare to go to bed until I 'd read every word. The characters are all somewhat eccectric but lovable, each in their own way. Mary Fred is somewhat like a modern-day Pollyanna, changing the environment everywhere she goes just by being herself. I can't wait to read another book by this author! Read it you won't be disappointed.

A young woman raised in an extreme apocalypic religious community is extensively educated about the world outside, but has never been exposed to it. By a government decree, Mary Fred then joins a curious family which knows nothing of her world, but is enmeshed in their own. The inevitable culture contast brings about few sparks and much unexpected mutual contribution. Mary Fred, one of the four protagonists of the volume, elegantly repels the needy-ness that her hosts imagine for her. By pure strength of character and benign cleverness, she molds the world of her adoptive family to meet her needs, while at the same time using their embrace to grieve her catastrophic losses, which are never far beneath the surface.

Despite her bizarre beliefs, Mary Fred's integrity causes a turmoil in her adoptive family. Her purportive mother Alice is a middle aged woman whose main characteristic is the need to be needed and molded by others. Alice's teenage daughter Heather is bent on cynicism and depression at all costs, which she has willfully paid. Alice's brother Roy, whose unexpected secret shall remain for the reader to discover, ultimatley carries the unspoken message of The Book of Fred: human transformation.

Mary Fred is a stone that plunges into the pond of her adoptive family, whose ripples grow in intensity and tension as each family member is forced to confront him or herself in succession. By the stunning climax, all that each has always known is violently torn apart by an unexpected catastrophe, and the structure of lies they have been telling themselves collapses like a house of cards in the resulting quake.

The seemingly inevitable response to these disturbances is that each family member becomes the better angel of their nature, and they do it in a hurry. Where there was weakness, suddenly there is power.

Soon Mary Fred's work in the city is done, and she returns to her biological family and their strange rural world. But she is not the same -- her strict doctrines been tainted by the wisdom and compassion of the new family she has come to know and love. But now she finds herself in a third universe, without either the integirty of her native family or the compassion of her adoptive one, and ultimately she rejects it, with the heroic assistance of her true mother.

It is impossible to read this volume and not recongnize yourself and those you love in its pages. That's what makes the reader so passionate about devouring every kernel.

I bought this book because the synopsis on the back cover offered an interesting premise. 15 year old Mary Fred is removed from her parents' custody after two of her brothers die of curable illnesses. The family belongs to a fundamentalist sect which mixes Christianity and the teachings of one Fred Brown (thus, every one's name must have Fred in it and every member must wear only brown clothing). The Freds have isolated themselves from the rest of society, so Mary Fred has never seen a TV or a supermarket, or gone to a school outside the walls of the sect's compound. The most dangerous thing about the religion is that the members do not believe in doctors or medicine. Mary Fred is placed into foster care with the Cullisons, a family which is supposed to represent a microcosm of typical 90s problems. We have the blue haired teenager, Heather, whose after school life consists of watching Jerry Springer and Judge Judy, the permissive, insecure single mom, Alice, and her secretly drug-addicted brother, Roy. Through her good cheer, warmth and hopefulness (as well as her cooking and organizational skills), Mary Fred changes them all, somehow giving each what he or she needs in a manner reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz (which is mentioned several times in this book), transforming them into a viable family. In a scene recalling Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole, Mary Fred eventually gets what she needs for herself, as well (a la` Dorothy).

My concerns about this book are many. The writing is uneven. The book is paced a bit slowly until the last chapter which rushes along with blinding speed, minimizing very serious issues in its haste. The book is divided into five sections. Each section is spoken by a character in the book: first Mary Fred, then Alice, then Heather, then Roy and back to Mary Fred. This might be a successful writing technique if the characters each had a distinct voice and the chapters sounded like they actually came from different people.

The description of the Freds was somewhat awkward, as though the author had put together a group of silly values in order to create a sect--eating fish but no meat, wearing only brown, selecting January 7th as Judgement Day, etc--while the sect portrayed in the last chapter seems to be lifted directly from media reports of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Not very creative...

Everything is too neat, too perfect; everyone is happy. Heather turns off the TV, Roy completes a program at a rehab center, and Alice finds love with the doctor who saves Mary Fred's life after an accident. And all this from a 15 year old whose parents are in jail, who lost two brothers due to parental neglegence, and who has no idea where her younger siblings are. I cannot imagine how this child, from an isolated, disturbed family, with all her social and emotional limitations, has come by such incredible powers! More believable are the changes Mary Fred makes, thanks to the Cullisons. After all, what teenager could resist K-mart, pink hair clips and suburban high school football jocks? She takes to these mainstays of American life as though she were born to them--and we know she was not.

Mary Fred's mother eventually comes to get her (after a stint in prison), and brings her to their new sect, the old one having apparently fled the Bureau of Child Welfare. A violent confrontation occurs between the police and sect leaders. Mary Fred escapes during the chaos and makes her way back to the Cullisons. While the chapters dealing with life at the Cullisons are pleasant, particlarly with respect to Heather and Mary Fred, the last chapter attempts too much, overwhelms us and leaves us with too many questions.

THE BOOK OF FRED, by ABBY BARDI
Washington Square Press
this taken from full review at Roses & Thorns...
by KATHRYN MAGENDIE

In Abby Bardi's The Book of Fred, at times I felt as if I were lost in a room of fun-house mirrors, but in that deliciously entertaining way those wavery-reflectors have of making us see ourselves and the world about us in a different way, and sometimes in a way that isn't flattering--for through the first person accounts of Bardi's main characters: Mary Fred, Alice, Heather, and Uncle Roy, we see perspectives of lives filled with desire, addiction, pain, loss, loneliness, bewilderment, betrayal, and finally, hope. Abby Bardi handles delicate issues with a light touch, but not so light one does not deeply feel each of her character's voices in a whole and unique way.

This "Family of Misfits" learns that things are not always as they seem, and that love, trust, sacrifice, and family are sometimes hard-won, but more beautifully, happiness and peace can come in unexpected and surprising ways. (As an aside, I would have liked to know what happened to Mary Fred's remaining brothers, "The Littles," but was mostly satisfied to know that she would try to find them later, for I understood that things were as they needed to be for the book without going into too many "tangents." Still, I did wonder.)

There are passages and phrases in the book that made me nod my head and smile, or say, "Yes! She's got it..." Bardi's writing is hopeful, fresh, and quite good. I appreciate how each character struggles to remain locked in their own "status quo," but with Mary Fred as the catalyst, Alice, Heather, Uncle Roy, and Mary Fred herself, at last find their way to redemption. The ending left me with a sigh, for I liked the main characters (although, I did enjoy Mary Fred and Uncle Roy's voices the most), and wished them well-- Abby Bardi's The Book of Fred did not disappoint me in that regard.

I wasn't sure what I was in store for when I picked up this book. The description of a foster girl going from a closed religious cult into the world sounded interesting. The story itself is great and is narrated by all the characters in the novel. Each one gets their own "Book" to give their perspective of life before and after "M.F." (Mary Fred). Very readable for both teens and adults.
The modern world looks absurd through Mary's eyes; as much as her world looks through ours. Watching the transformation of the daughter Heather really brings home the 'electronic' age consequences. Great summer reading!

Each part of this story, which covers about a year in the life of Mary Fred and her foster family, is told from the POV of a different character, which is why I enjoyed it so much. Central character Mary Fred is removed from a cult and moves in with a foster family consisting of Alice, her teenage daughter Heather, and Alice's brother Roy. They each tell a portion of the story.

I have to admit I was skeptical of being able to tolerate Mary Fred's narrative the first 20 pages or so, but after she left the cult and began to experience a new life and the other characters were introduced, I was totally emersed. I read the whole thing in about 4 hours on a Sunday morning. It was great. And by the end I loved Mary Fred just as much as her foster family. Highly reccommend this read.