Customer Reviews

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

With its colorful title and kitschy cover design, I wasn't sure what to expect from Elizabeth Stuckey-French's new novel "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady." The retro allure of the book seemed at odds with an advance blurb referencing, of all things, the film "Little Miss Sunshine." Well, the "Sunshine" comparison really does the book no favors--the two couldn't be more dissimilar other than the fact that they're both populated by a quirky family of dysfunction. Taking its cue from a devastatingly real tragedy, "Radioactive Lady" manages to be pleasingly heartfelt and slyly amusing. I credit Stuckey-French for attempting to meld this serio-comic romp onto a story that, more often than not, would have been played as dire drama. In fact, the notion that the novel was so light in tone was off-putting at first, but I eventually let the premise give way to a cast of likable and relatable characters (not necessarily an easy task in a book filled with eccentricities).

"Radioactive Lady" tells the story of Marylou Ahearn, an elderly lady, still reeling from the death of her daughter decades in the past. While pregnant in the fifties, Marylou had unwittingly been used as a guinea pig in a medical study exploring the effects of radiation. By happenstance, Marylou has located the doctor directly involved (oh, the invention of Google) and has set herself on a course of revenge and retribution. Renamed Nancy Archer, an homage to the sci-fi film "Attack of the 50-foot Woman," she heads off to pursue her darkest ambition. Insinuating herself into Dr. Wilson Sprigg's life, however, necessitates her interactions with his family--his daughter who's withdrawing with menopause, a workaholic and flirtatious son-in-law, a beautiful elder granddaughter fixated on Elvis, a grandson who is a mad scientist, and the seemingly normal granddaughter that holds the family together.

The chapters alternate between Marylou and the other characters, and Stuckey-French does a great job really humanizing each person involved. The two older children, Ava and Otis, both have Asperger's Syndrome and the author never condescends even as she uses the disease as a plot device. Suzy, the youngest daughter, carries much of the story and it is her relationship with Marylou that starts to unravel the nefarious plot to ruin the family. Needless to say, not everything goes according to plan and huge revelations are in store for the entire clan.

Throughout it all, the gently comedic tone is perfectly balanced. It would have been very easy for this tale to veer way off into left field. Too much quirkiness can be a truly bad thing. But here, as I said, I believed in the characters and their peculiarities. This was a modern family, albeit heightened, who seemed realistically dysfunctional. So, I enjoyed "Radioactive Lady" and its pleasantly off-kilter look at what defines a family. It was fitfully funny, with charm to spare. I wasn't too surprised to see where the novel was headed, but I was entertained along the way. KGHarris, 12/10.

This nifty book was a pleasure from start to finish. How Elizabeth Stuckey-French accomplished this story with all the characters, back-story, elements, and plots and tied them up into this wonderful package is quite a feat. This is quite a different novel.

Marylou Ahearn, aka Nance Archer, aka The Radioactive Lady - moved to Tallahassee for the sole purpose of revenge. The recipient of the revenge is a doctor she'd had an experience with years ago that altered her life, however, the old man lives hidden inside of a household full of his dysfunctional family members and is going senile. Vic, his son in law, buries himself in his work and has an odd obsession with hurricanes while his wife, miserable and unhappy cares for their two nearly grown Asberger children, Otis and Ava, and their youngest 'normal' daughter Suzi. Wilson Spriggs, the old doctor who Marylou is fixated on killing lives a life of day to day confusion in their midst.

Marylou or Nance, as they know her, has moved into a house in their neighborhood and weasles her way into becoming a family friend. Nance schemes of ways to destroy them all, well, inbetween helping them in some form or another. It's all pretty crazy, and you'll have to read the book to find out what exactly happens since there is a story about each one of them.

This book is just a fun read which is hard to admit with the seriousness of the underlying reason that Marylou goes to Tallahassee with her Corgi, Buster, to enact her revenge on an old man, that and some of the other monstrous things that occur in this book are of a serious nature, but Stuckey-French manages it all with a more than human edge and wonderful sense of humor and a good grasp of marital and family relations.

This story is a touching read, funny and sad, relatable at most times and just a good all around read. Only a talented writer could weave such intricate subjects into such a heart warming, fun tale of revenge and family angst with a backdrop of people just trying to survive the world.

Terrific.

I don't read slice of life dramatic books. Especially anything that's shelved in the Literature/Fiction aisle. I used to, I read Brothers Karamazov, The Stranger, Rabbit at Rest, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and many other fiction titles when I was in school. But once I hit the big city - Santa Rosa - and bigger libraries and used book stores, I started to read more, shall we say, sensational fiction titles. Books with the word Dead, Undead, Love and Vampire in them. Maybe moving out on my own made me yearn for more fantasy in my fiction, I don't know and could spend forever pondering my love of romantic, horrific or mysterious books over more serious literary fare.

So, when I say that this book is a departure from my usual reading choices, I really mean it. The fact that I kept with the story straight through to the end is pretty strange too, because I thought this was a book about a woman with a supernatural power caused by exposure to radiation. Hilarious, right? Let's just say I was in a hurry to pick out a book and the title and cover art won me over.

From the start of the book, I was sucked into the seething rage and sadness of the heroine, Marylou whose life was irrevocably changed when she was an unwitting participant in a medical experiment when she was pregnant with her first child. From this point on you see how this event, the tiny cup of gritty pink liquid and her fixation on the handsome young doctor in charge of the experiment shape her life.

It isn't hard to sympathize with Marylou, she's been wronged in such a hurtful and tragic way that I almost quit the book when I found out the object of her murderous fantasies had dementia. How satisfying would her revenge be if the doctor is too addled to remember her much less understand her sick rage?

But then the granddaughter enters the story. Suzy has a lot going on. A mother who doesn't like her, a dad whose terminally distracted,a demented grandpa with a murky past, siblings whose Aspergers disease has completely taken over the family. Suzy's place in the world is like an admonishment, a reminder of how ill and unlikely to lead a normal life her brother and sister have.

A chance meeting (carefully planned by Marylou) with the older lady down the street offers a welcome distraction and even better a place to be appreciated and even perhaps liked.

In all of the roiling machinations that follow it was Suzy that carries the story. She isn't unblemished by the sorrows that have beset her family, but she was the one that most had a chance to escape.

There's a lot to giggle over with this book and after I got over my disappointment that there would be no superheroes or super villains I found the book to be interesting and the characters memorable.

This book starts off with a rather wickedly funny idea of a woman getting revenge. I truly did laugh out loud. The set up, however, was very unclear, and I remember having to reread a few pages to figure out who had died and who that person was relative to MaryLou. I too was surprised that the book shifted perspective.

Once the story got going, and the deception was underway, I started to find MaryLou alias Nancy, to be incredibly disturbing. It is one thing to plot to kill from revenge, but to go after all the family members in the devious and nonsensical ways described -- encouraging a teenaged girl with Asperger's to pose nude, encouraging her teenaged brother also with Asperger's to realize his dream of building a nuclear reactor (which was a carbon copy of the so-called "Radioactive Boy Scout"), and encouraging the other team to "find religion" -- made it hard to enjoy the book. I felt the character had really gone too far, so I lost the initial sympathy I had for her. And her sudden change of heart at the end of the book was also hard to believe.

So by the end, I was less enthusiastic about the book than I had been at the beginning.

"The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" is the most delightful dark comedy I have read, hmmmmmm, ever. Elizabeth Stuckey-French has quite the imagination and the talent to take her story to the most unexpected, strange places and make it work.

Too many authors attempt this sort of writing and it falls flat like leaving me wonder who at the publishing firm thought it was a good idea to actually publish it. I was expecting to be disappointed yet again, thinking I was roped in by a great title. But, I was quite pleased!

Several times I couldn't stop chuckling or let out an unexpected "HA!"

Definitely a winner. I'm anxious to read more of Stuckey-French's work.

In the 1950's, Marylou Ahearn was the unwitting guinea pig in a radiation experiment that had a fatal outcome for her family. The project came to light during the Clinton Administration and now, at age 77, Marylou has decided to exact her revenge on the doctor in charge of the horrible project. She is, in fact, going to murder Dr. Wilson Spriggs.

It took her several years to finally track down Dr. Spriggs, but thanks to the miracle of the internet, she has found him living with his daughter and her family in Tallahassee, FL. So, to Tallahassee she goes, with murder on her mind, and cons her way into the very fabric of his family, with sometimes disastrous consequences and never with quite the results she imagined.

On the surface, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady is a darkly humorous tale, but it goes much deeper than that. The author uses Marylou and her desire for revenge as a vehicle to explore the family of Dr. Spriggs--one which on the outside seems so perfectly typical, but on the inside, where none but the family can see. . . Well, it's really typical there too--full of miss-communication, heartbreak, love, adversity, disorder, and triumph, both small and earth-shatteringly large. In a word, they are EVERY family.

The novel itself is quite well written, with each chapter continuing on the story from the viewpoint of another character, either Marylou or a member of Dr. Spriggs' family. The characters are fresh, real and engaging. In Marylou, for example, Ms. Stuckey-French has created an appealing character, torn between her better nature and her desire for revenge. With Ava and Otis, as another example, she shows two different, yet similar, sides of Asperger's Syndrome with painful and amusing truthfulness. (As one intimately familiar with Asperger's Syndrome, I found her treatment refreshing: not sappy, not overly optimistic, just quite realistic.)

Overall, though it is touted as a "dark comedy" (and rightfully so), it is so much more than that. The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady is the tale of family triumph, and of how things never quite work out how we have them planned, and of how life is good--despite it all, life is good.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French weaves a spirited tale of a lady named Marylou Ahern who was given a dose of radioactive "vitamins" back in the early 50's without her knowledge. She believes that the death of her daughter from cancer at 8 years was caused by the radioactive cocktail and after Googling the doctor's name and finding that he lives in Florida, sets off to murder him to avenge her daughter's death. The only problem is that she's now almost 80 years old and the doctor now lives with his daughter's family and is experiencing memory loss. She decides to move from her home in Memphis, to Tallahassee to secretly plot her revenge.

The author introduces us to the doctor's family members, each one more quirky than the next. There are two children with Asperger's Syndrome and another who is mostly normal but ignored by her mother, a father who is busy chasing hurricanes and the author describes how they exist in this very dysfunctional family unit. Each chapter focuses on one of the characters and we find out interesting secrets about each one. You can't help liking them as the story goes on, no matter how quirky or eccentric they are.

The description for this book on Amazon as "laugh-out-loud funny" is, in my opinion, misleading. The book was far from being a comedy. The only funny thing about the book was how dysfunctional the family and characters could be. (Is there any family that's really functional?) It was more amusing than funny. That said, I found the book very entertaining and well written. I'll look for more of Stuckey-French's books.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French's new novel, "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" is one of the best novels I've read this year. It's not serious literature - though there is a serious component to it it - but is a delightful character study of a family-in-flux and the mysterious woman who both helps and hinders their attempt to come together. Stucky-French has written a comedy-of-manners about a family whose lives are no comedies.

The Witherspoon family of Tallahassee consists of parents losing touch with each other at mid-life, both searching for happiness without the other, and three children. The two oldest, Ava and Otis, both have Aspergers Syndrome, which hinders their daily lives, and a younger daughter, Suzi, who's a soccer whiz. And then there's Caroline Witherspoon's father, Dr Wilson Spriggs, who lives with the family. Dr Spriggs had conducted medical experiments with pregnant women back in the 1950's with radio-active ingredients. Dr Spriggs, in his old-age, has lost touch with his memory and doesn't remember too much about the experiments.

Into this family's life in the summer of 2006 comes a new neighbor, Nancy Archer, who has moved into their middle-class Tallahassee suburb. If Dr Spriggs no longer remembers those long-ago experiments in Memphis, Nancy Archer has spent a life living with the results of them. While pregnant, she was a patient and was given a radio active drink. Eight years later, she and her husband lost their 8 year old daughter to cancer - proven to be attributable to the radio-active drink she had taken years before. "Nancy Archer" aka Marylou Ahern, has vowed revenge on Dr Spriggs for, essentially killing her precious daughter. She has spent her life looking for Dr Spriggs and once she's found him, she vows revenge. Hence, "the revenge of the radioactive lady".

Nancy gets involved with the Witherspoon family and sets out to ruin their lives. But things happen and she's unable to exploit the weaknesses in the family. Instead, she works to bring them together. Stucky-French has created a whole cast of characters - both primary and secondary - who are almost real people to the reader. It's a delightful story, despite the rather grim beginnings, and Stucky-French has done good with her writing talents.

Comedy, like so many things, is a matter of taste: some people laugh at slapstick, some at dry wit, some at cross-dressing British comedians. As a few of the other reviews at this site have demonstrated, not everyone will find The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady funny. My sense of humor must mirror Elizabeth Stuckey-French's because I found myself smiling, chuckling, and often laughing out loud at her quirky characters and offbeat plot.

Its title notwithstanding, the novel is less about revenge than it is about a family dynamic -- yes, it's yet another story about a dysfunctional family. Ava (who loves Elvis and flirts with the notion of being the next America's Top Model) and Otis (who is trying to build a nuclear reactor in the tool shed) both have Asperger's syndrome. Their neurotic and depressed mother, Caroline, is nearly always in a foul mood, in part because she's approaching fifty and feels her best years (such as they were) are behind her. Caroline's husband, Vic, obsesses about hurricanes. Vic has detached himself from the family and has more than a passing interest in the parson's sister. Caroline's father, Wilson Spriggs, is a retired physician who suffers from Alzheimer's; having outlived his wife, he lives with Caroline's family. Only the middle child, Suzi, seems to meet societal expectations of normalcy (she's bright, beautiful, and popular), yet she gets herself into deeper trouble than her less advantaged siblings. While all of this sounds like the foundation for a tragedy rather than a comedy, laughter (as they say) is the best medicine, and Stuckey-French finds ample opportunity to inject humor into the family members' woeful lives.

The radioactive lady to whom the title refers is Marylou, who in 1953 became an unknowing participant in a government-financed experiment. While visiting a clinic for prenatal care, Marylou was given a drink containing radioactive isotopes as part of a study overseen by Dr. Spriggs. She attributes her daughter's death from childhood cancer to the radioactive liquid. It is for this that Marylou has vowed revenge and, having found Spriggs in Florida fifty-three years later, she plans to kill him -- or at least to disrupt the lives of his family members. I know, it still doesn't sound funny, but dark comedy is necessarily about dark subjects.

The main characters are recognizable (maybe even as members of our families) without becoming stereotypes. Some of the minor characters (like the lecherous pastor and his goth daughter) are a bit more formulaic, but they nonetheless seem real. The story moves quickly, reflecting a writing style that is comedic rather than literary. Despite its dark side, an underlying sweetness shines through. The novel teaches familiar but nonetheless worthwhile lessons: (1) vengeance, like radioactive particles, can spread in unexpected ways, touching innocent people and causing unforeseen effects; (2) forgiveness heals more effectively than revenge; (3) even if you can't be perfectly happy, perhaps you can be happy enough; and (4) we're all weird in our own ways. Sometimes the weirdness has a label: autistic, obsessive, neurotic. Other times it doesn't. "Some of us," Stuckey-French writes, "are more 'typical' than others, that's all."

Whether you read this novel for laughs or for its lighthearted life lessons, you're likely to be satisfied -- assuming your sense of humor is tickled by the story I've described. If it's not, this probably isn't the novel for you. I liked it so much that I would give it 4 1/2 stars if that option were available.

In 1958, a 50-foot woman attacked movie theaters in a rampage of "revenge and desire." The science-fiction camp classic has been revered and reviled in equal doses over the years--audiences either love the tale of Nancy Archer, hard-drinking socialite who turns into a giantess and goes after her husband and his mistress, or they put "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" on par with "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Either way, Nancy Archer has served as a prototype for cautionary feminist tales for the last 50 years.

In her novel, "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady," Elizabeth Stuckey-French ("The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa") has gleefully embraced this same spirit of a scorned woman seeking retribution. Stuckey-French's story is set in 2006 and stars the unforgettable septuagenarian Marylou Ahearn who, we're told in the book's first sentence, has "spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs."

Marylou is on a mission of murder: "She tried to spur herself on with angry thoughts. Would she feel better after she'd killed him? Darn tootin'." When she finally catches up with Spriggs, now a doddering old man living in Florida with his daughter's family, Marylou has the first of many surprises in the book: Wilson Spriggs has Alzheimer's. She's thwarted, but not completely undone. If she can't kill Wilson Spriggs, then she will at least make his life miserable.

But who, exactly, is Wilson Spriggs and what did he ever do to poor old Marylou Ahearn?

For that answer, we have to go back to 1953 when Spriggs was a doctor participating in a secret government experiment. Bow-tied, foppish, pretentious, he supplied a pregnant Marylou with a radioactive cocktail "in a cold metal cup of pink fizzy liquid that smelled like strawberries." This, he assured her, was "a vitamin cocktail to keep her baby healthy."

Eight years later, Marylou's beloved daughter dies of cancer. Then, decades after that, the truth about Spriggs and the government program comes out and, like the 50-foot woman, Marylou's anger grows to enormous proportions. Swollen with rage, she starts planning the murder of the man responsible for poisoning eight-hundred women and their unborn children. Now, "lusty, powerful, ready to get hers," Marylou is ready to "fly at him and fling his parts all over the flat-assed state of Florida."

If the thought of two elderly people duking it out to the death isn't hilarious enough for you, then Stuckey-French's whimsical style will surely hit your funny bone. Offbeat, jaunty, and sometimes poignant, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady plants its tongue in its cheek from the start and only takes it out for an ending that earns its feel-good denouement honestly.

Stuckey-French stirs a lot of ingredients into her stew, but laughter is the primary spice. Once Marylou finds Spriggs in Florida and ingratiates herself into his family (taking the alias of the 50-foot "Nancy Archer"), she realizes killing him might not be as easy as she once thought:

"She did not feel a bit sorry for him. In fact, after meeting with him and talking with him and observing him, she hated him even more than she had when he'd simply been an abstract bogeyman. It was easier to despise him now that she had particulars to focus on--his spotty, shaking hand waving in her direction like an underwater plant when he was trying to tell her something but couldn't form the words; his habit of farting like a pack mule when he walked; the way he sat three inches away from the TV screen and stared at the idiotic commercials for Depends diapers as if they were words of wisdom from on high. And him--some smart research doctor who thought he was better than everyone else! A Nazi doctor who treated pregnant women like his own personal guinea pigs!"

"The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" is told from a multitude of viewpoints--mostly from the "American Nazi's" family. Chapters alternate between Spriggs' menopausal daughter Caroline, her hurricane-obsessed husband Vic, and their three children: Ava who sees Elvis in the marbled swirls of shower stalls, clouds, and half-used bars of soap; Otis, a boy genius with Asperger's who is building a model breeder reactor in the shed out back; and 13-year-old Suzi whose sibling rivalry with Ava will eventually have disastrous results. Though not all of the character's voices succeed (I found Vic to be rather flat and uninteresting) and I wished Marylou hadn't stepped so far off-stage once the novel began, when Stuckey-French clicks, she really clicks. Her character studies of Ava and Suzi, especially, are vivid portraits of the modern American teenager. She has their distinct patter down to--well, down to a science. She knows how these girls tick, how they talk, how they dream, and what kind of posters they put on their bedroom walls (My Chemical Romance). Stuckey-French is a writer who pays attention to the world.

What begins as a tale of vengeance eventually turns out to be a sharp-eyed dissection of the nuclear family in America, with all its foibles and failures. Stuckey-French shows how just one little old five-foot lady can disrupt a family, splitting the homey image of Ward and June Cleaver like an atom. In this case, Revenge is not only sweet, it's very, very funny.

This review originally appeared at The Quivering Pen blog