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40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, insightful and flooring, November 3, 2003
But Inside I'm Screaming enthralled me from beginning to end. I literally dropped everything to read this from cover to cover. News anchorman Isabel Murphy has a nervous breakdown in front of millions of viewers. She arrives at Three Breezes -- a.k.a. the "nut hut" -- with the hope to regain some normalcy in her life. When her past begins to unravel, she wonders if she's ever lived a normal life. This novel reminds me of Girl, Interrupted. There are various similarities between the two books, but this novel touched me in a profound way. The characters are vivid, the dialogue is crisp and the story is as intense as it is insightful. Isabel's battle with depression floored me. Her realistic, unflinching honesty touched me. Book club members would devour this! I am buying a copy to all my friends. I urge you to give this wonderful literary offering a whirl.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing new, fresh, or even thought-provoking, June 14, 2007
This book owes a large debt to Girl, Interrupted, a medium debt to The Bell Jar, and even a small debt to the Lifetime movies at which the main protagonist, Isabel, sneers.
None of the characters are more than two-dimensional, even Isabel. We're given flashes of her unhappy childhood with daddy issues, her unhappy adult relationships, her unhappy professional life...okay, we get she's depressed. But it all feels like a thin veneer to excuse the "shocking" (not) look inside mental institutions. The author would rather throw a few extra stereotypical patients in than explore any of the very real and very deep emotions and thought processes suicide attempters go through. Oh, here's a babykiller! Oh, here's a Daddy's Girl! But don't come any closer, they're CRAAAAAAZY. Sigh. The plot is so very thin that nearly every paragraph is a chapter break, apparently in order to stretch it from novella length to novel. So much space could have used so much more constructively!
At the very least, the author seems to attempt some sort of empathy in the end for the patients, and bring it back to how we're all snuggly humans who just need love, which I guess is better than openly mocking them and their supposedly-Lifetime-ready foibles...so the second star is for attitude. But I'm still not going to bother passing it around any book clubs.
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Trite Candy For the Mind, September 17, 2005
In her debut novel, But Inside I'm Screaming, author Elizabeth Flock follows the challenging events Isabel Murphy, a young news reporter, has after freezing on air while reporting on Princess Diana's fatal auto accident, attempting suicide and ultimately ending up in a psychiatric hospital. An endorsement from author Mary Jane Clark appears on the paperback edition of Flock's novel in which Clark describes the novel as "insightful." Flock's depiction of Isabel's experience with mental illness and her stay at a private and exclusive psychiatric facility are far from insightful.
What Flock offers is a three hundred page novel that reads like light, beach literature, that is trite candy for the mind and offers no insight into the human condition. In the end, Flock's novel reads like a fable and concludes with the moral: if one loves oneself, then all else in one's life will be positive. The main character even has the opportunity to share this moral lesson with a young child who is in the pediatric portion of the hospital. Isabel not only is allowed to approach this child who does not know her, but she goes on to impart her life's lesson using language that a child of the age the author depicts would not understand, or be able to apply to his own life.
Another unfortunate outcome upon concluding But Inside I'm Screaming is the feeling of emptiness the reader acquires when realizing that the character Isabel is vapid and no other characters were developed. Flock does not invest author or reader time in developing the supporting characters of the novel which would serve to embellish the story and provide a more appropriate backdrop to Isabel's saga. Characters the reader is to believe are of import to Isabel include her parents, the small group of patients that are in the hospital while she is there, her spouse and close colleagues.
Minimally, without developing the cadre of characters that are involved in her daily life at the hospital (which is the setting for the majority of the book) the reader is left wondering how Isabel's condition is improving given she has no opportunity for dialogue with others. Furthermore, by Flock's own pen, Isabel is becoming a role model for the mentally ill clients her therapist sees. But Inside I'm Screaming is not a realistic portrayal of the ravaging effects that mental illness can have on an Isabel, particularly a character that requires hospitalization. This reviewer is astonished that Flock is a seasoned reporter (who evidently left behind not only her career as a reporter but her ability to conduct thorough and reliable research as well) and writer who readily earned publication of a second novel, with a third on the way.
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