Speak Softly, She Can Hear [Paperback]

Pam Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2005

It's the sixties, and sixteen-year-old Carole Mason and her friend Naomi set out to lose their virginity to Eddie Lindbaeck, a man they barely know. Events, however, go horribly wrong when a woman ends up dead in a motel room, and a terrible secret between the friends is sealed. Ten years later, the girls have grown up and lost touch, but Carole is still haunted by that night. When Naomi unexpectedly re-enters her life and throws it into turmoil, Carole is forced to come to terms with what really happened and seeks out revenge and finally redemption.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blurbed by Wally Lamb as "a sexy and suspenseful psychological thriller," Lewis's debut opens with shy, overweight New York City schoolgirl Carole Mason heading to a Vermont cabin, where she intends to lose her virginity to handsome but venal Eddie Lindbaeck. Soon after she does, Eddie's friend Rita shows up for a threesome. When a bout of rough sex leaves Rita dead, Eddie convinces the drunken Carole that she broke Rita's neck. Carole's best friend, Naomi, arrives at the cabin, and the three of them dump Rita's body in a snowdrift, swearing to never reveal what has happened. The reader knows (if Carole doesn't) that Eddie and Naomi will use this secret to make her life a living hell. Eddie demands that Carole give him stolen presents, extorts money from her and seduces her mother. Carole responds by leaving college and starting a new life as a waitress in Manhattan. Eddie finds her, and she runs again, and again, winding up in Vermont not far from where they buried Rita years before. Eddie and Naomi turn up and cause more trouble until a final confrontation settles the matter once and for all. There aren't many surprises, but this is well-written and gripping enough that readers will stay up late to see whether beleaguered, tortured Carole can free herself from the despicable Eddie.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

It was 1965 when shy, overweight Carole Mason was only 16 and her dreams of losing her virginity to the handsome college-dropout Eddie Lindbaeck turned into a nightmare she could never forget. Her prep-school friend, Naomi, set it all up--a cabin in the woods of Vermont and Eddie to do the deed. After too much alcohol and sex, Eddie invites a strange woman into the cabin. Carole remembers little of what happened except that by the end of the night, the stranger was dead, the body buried beneath the snow, and a secret was born, tying Eddie, Naomi, and Carole to each other forever. Over the years, Carole tries to escape the torment of that night--running away and hiding from Eddie and Naomi, but they always seem to find her. And now, 11 years later, the secret has unexpectedly bubbled to the surface, and Carole has to choose between the truth and running away again. Lewis, in her debut novel, tells an engrossing tale of an unlikely friendship, the burden of keeping secrets, and the insidiousness of lies. Carolyn Kubisz
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Review (August 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755309537
• ISBN-13: 978-0755309535
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,413,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Pam Lewis lives in Storrs, Connecticut with her explorer-adventurer husband, Rob Funk. She was born in Burbank, California to a pair of highly ambitious parents who moved the family every few years as her father sought greater responsibilities in the then-bourgeoning aviation industry.
The family finally settled in New York City for long enough for her to attend high school. She was a shy, observant girl, a little too tall too soon and only excelled at school when she finally set her sights on Stanford University and squeaked in on so-so grades. She married immediately after college, and, bucking the trend of feminism and a career, set about raising two magnificent children, Lukas and Joshua Casey who are now well into their adulthoods.
She worked at a motley assortment of jobs including Welcome Wagon lady, treasurer to a small corporation, reporter and swim instructor. When more serious money was required she wrote marketing copy for insurance companies in which the objective was to make the reader see his or her diminishing health and retirement benefits as a welcome change. During this time she wrote fiction furiously every morning, more as pleasure and a touch of therapy than with an eye to publication, which, at that point in her life, seemed unlikely. On the cusp of her 59th year, her first book was taken by Simon and Schuster, then a second and now, with the upcoming publication of A Young Wife, a third.

Visit my website at pamlewisonline.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not perfect, but a solid page-turner with good characters, July 14, 2005

By 

B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speak Softly, She Can Hear: A Novel (Hardcover)

When I find myself staying up reading past my bedtime, it's a sure indicator that the book I'm holding is at least a 4 rating. The plot of this novel drew me in quickly, right from the first few pages, and the scenes and action moved along at a good pace through the book's end.

Without giving away the ending, let me say that the fate of the evil Eddie was highly satisfying and, while other reviewers' complaints about the heroine, Carole, do resonate with me, I did not ultimately find her tiresome. Rather, I liked watching her reach the boiling point and finally taking sweet revenge on Eddie for tormenting her all those years.

In some ways, this book reminds me of two others I enjoyed: The Secret History by Donna Tart and The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, both of which tell stories of young people with dark secrets.

Tart's book is truly superior and a 5 all the way, but I can see how Lewis might eventually work up to writing of Tart's quality, especially given her talent for characterization. The heroine's hippie friend, Rachel, for instance, is so like women I knew in the 60s that I felt I almost knew her personally.

Speak Softly, She Can Hear is a very good debut novel that is worthy of your attention if you enjoy well-written suspense stories.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Goes a Mile a Minute, February 24, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speak Softly, She Can Hear: A Novel (Hardcover)

Carole Mason is a fat, unpopular teen at New York's prestigious Spence School, presented here as a nest of vipers a la MEAN GIRLS, who has one girlfriend, Naomi, a Park Avenue wild child with Paris Hilton appetites.

The year is 1965, at the brink of the sexual revolution, when Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick were bona fide celebrities of cafe society. Carole and Naomi start an innocent bet to see which of them will lost her virginity first to the attractive young actor, Eddie Lindbaeck, a boy will go down in thriller history as one of the most menacing villains since Sydney Greenstreet played Count Fosco in THE WOMAN IN WHITE. In a snowy ski camp in Stowe, Vermont, Carole stumbles into an awful trap and wakes up believing she has killed a local. The rest of the book develops her strategies for putting this murder behind her.

Like a heroine from Cornell Woolrich, Carole Mason is literally trapped by her past. Pam Lewis has a talent for suspense, and the book will keep you up all night trying to figure out how poor Carole will stay one step ahead of both the police and her savage "friends" Naomi and Eddie.

The story continues for years, through the summer of love in the Haight-Ashbury, to a Moosewood-like restaurant in the New England countryside in the 1970s. Actually I don't know why Ms. Lewis didn't set the novel at a more recent time, there's actually no reason why the book had to be set in the 1960s, and her anachronisms are sometimes grating. (Would a girl describe another girl as dressing "like Tricia Nixon" in 1965? I don't think so. Did young men snap, "Whatever," in 1975, or was that usage a byproduct of the Valley Girl-speak of the early 1980s?)

Every time I saw the words "Carole Mason," I thought of the esteemed experimental novelist "Carole Maso" who teaches at Brown, and I wondered if Pam Lewis was pointing some kind of admonitory finger at Maso. But that's just me.

The publishers are marketing this book like it's some kind of cross between Donna Tartt and other famous writers (the book jacket and the book title just scream, "Hi, I'm by Mary Higgins Clark"!) but Lewis' talent is resolutely her own, and even though you may want to shake Carole Mason for being such a ninny, no one with a heart can deny her sympathy, and the scenes in which she learns to love and give trust have a genuine pathos, and an honesty that's hardwon and feels real. I hope Pam Lewis comes to San Francisco so I can shake her hand and congratulate her for having made such a disturbing and shivery debut.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, October 13, 2005

By 

Erin Brooks "Erin Brooks" (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speak Softly, She Can Hear: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the story of a 16 year old girl who's made a terrible mistake, and has to live with it and pay for it for the next ten years of her life.

The story is well written with characters who stick with you. You follow the main character through her journey to try to let go of something that is bigger than her. It is a thriller but it also touches on some issues we can all relate to, like cliques and friends, lying when it'll make things worse, friendship, etc. It's scary all right, and Pam Lewis puts in enough twists and turns to make you want to keep on reading all night.

I really enjoyed that book a lot and would highly recommend it to anyone.