Strange Piece of Paradise (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Poised on that twilight edge between life and death, I felt intimately the part of me that was flesh, and I knew also that I..." (more)
Key Phrases: cowboy torso, strange niece, attractive cowboy, Cline Falls, Dirk Duran, Dee Dee (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author was a Yale student biking cross-country during the summer of 1977 when she and her roommate were attacked by an axe-wielding cowboy while camping in Oregon. Jentz escaped with a gashed arm, while her friend was nearly blinded from head injuries. Fifteen years later, in 1992, Jentz returns to the scene of the attack to repair the psychic wound and attempt to close the case. Dogged in her pursuit of the truth (though largely abandoning the subtitle's promise of introspection), Jentz interviews the witnesses who saw her stumble out of Cline Falls State Park that June night; she scrutinizes police files and discovers the halfhearted investigation of suspects, learning about several horrific killings that took place in Oregon then. Jentz even befriends the former girlfriends of one suspect who becomes frighteningly plausible as the culprit. She finally tracks down the local cowboy known for carving his initials into his axe handle; though he can no longer be prosecuted for the attack, the satisfaction of seeing him convicted for another offense is a bittersweet vindication. While a thorough, forthright detective, screenwriter Jentz tends to meander and includes unnecessary detail. Still, her story is chilling and will enthrall true crime readers. (May)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Terri Jentz's harrowing story finds voice in Strange Piece of Paradise, her first book. Critics praise Jentz's courage for returning to the scene of such violence, though several comment that the difficulty of uncovering compelling evidence nearly 30 years later precludes a satisfying conclusion. The book's chronological organization also presents some minor problems, and the book can be plodding at times. Still, the shortcomings do little to mute Jentz's powerful and elegant style, her craft honed by a career as a screenwriter. Critics favorably compare the effort to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and they applaud the author's willingness to face her demons.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374134987
• ISBN-13: 978-0374134983
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #495,482 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

92 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Honest Book That Is Felt As Much As It Is Read, May 2, 2006

By	Barbara (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This is an incredible read!

Even if the story were lacking, which it certainly isn't, Terri Jentz skillfull and honest re-telling of the events that forever altered and in many ways shaped the rest of her life could make up for it. But instead this book, 542 pages of very closely typed small print, is worth a thousand pages of raw emotion that left me feeling that it had been under, rather than overstated.

Page by page, the author takes you on a tour of her life from age 19, when as a college student at Yale, she and her roommate Shayna undertake a cross-country bicycle ride. Beginning and ending in Oregon, the summer-long excursion ends in a mere 7 days when an axe-wielding maniac first drives over the tent as the girls lie at camp sleeping, and then hacks and carves into them before returning to his truck and driving away.

The girls live, but Terri tells the story, detail by detail, and as a reader, I sensed that I too was on that bike ride, in the tent, and almost twenty years later, re-tracing both the steps leading up to the attack and the attack itself. But even more compelling is that the way Terri tells her story, all emotion is felt, including not only the fear and terror, but the emotionally blank periods in Terri's life in which, to cope with the horror, she had shut out her ability to sense the reality of what had happened to her as she related her experience to friends and acquaintences as if it were a piece of amusing fiction.

Finally, coming to grips with the knowledge that she had "disassociated with the self in the sleeping bag that night" in order to survive it emotionally, Terri sets out not only to retrace her steps in hope of regaining her lost emotions, but also, to discover the identity of her would-be murderer and the incredulity of a small town that knew so much more about what happened to her than she did herself.

This is a book that you wont want to put down until it is finished. It is not light reading, but told with such skill and honesty, it goes much more quickly than expected. Don't read it caffienated!

62 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Strange things happen to people in America. Some bitterly cruel. And some so beautiful that faith is retired forever.", June 16, 2006

By	Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

To Terri Jentz, Oregon is a dark and strange piece of paradise. After her freshman year at Yale, Jentz and her roommate Shayna set off on a summer 1977 Great American Journey--crossing the country from Oregon to Virginia on a BikeCentennial route. On Day 22 of the journey, Jentz and Shayna separated from a couple they had met on the road and then decided to stop for the night in an unapproved campground. They awoke that night to the unimaginable horror of a pickup truck driving through their tent, and then a handsome phantom of a cowboy striking them repeatedly with an axe.

Jentz was physically damaged by the event, but she moved on with her life as a woman unafraid of telling her story, unafraid of the dark, and still willing to tent-camp. Her companion Shayna had amnesia about the night and barely survived with limited vision. She distanced herself from Jentz and the memories of that night as much as possible.

Fifteen years later, Jentz returned to Cline Falls, Oregon to investigate her past. "Could I ever apply meaning to what had long seemed a senseless act, one that happened without pattern or reason?" "Who was the man who emerged that night in a desert park, bent on destruction?" The statute of limitations on attempted murder in Oregon was a mere three years, so Jentz's adult odyssey was truly a personal exploration, not a formal legal investigation. In Orgeon, Jentz teamed up with victim's rights advocate Dee Dee, who puts it best: "We kind of reward you because you're not very good at what you do. The only difference between attempted murder and murder is that somebody was inadequate in what they tried to do. Their intent was the same. That person is as great a danger to society as the person who completed the murder. Maybe they're a bad shot. Why would you reward them?"

It was the lack of formal legal recourse that allowed Jentz access to the close-knit community of Cline Falls. Over the course of a decade, she traveled to Oregon repeatedly to chase down leads, interview police, talk to witnesses, and re-unite with her rescuers and with the hospital staff who cared for her. The girls "who got chopped up at Cline Falls" were ingrained in the collective memory of Oregonians and the nation, and everyone had a flicker of recognition when Jentz identified herself. She quickly discovered that the town had long suspected one of their own, an alcoholic, abusive sadist with a long history of domestic violence, as the perpetrator. He even had a nickname--Dick Duran the Hatchet Man. In candid prose, Jentz describes the bureaucratic mistakes made in the investigation of her case (it became a turf war between three local agencies), as well as the 1977 public relations nightmare of talking about two girls who "asked for it" by camping alone in an unapproved area, and the face of crime in the 1970's (the term serial killer hadn't even been invented yet, and there were no crime tabloids and TV shows).

Despite the inconsistencies and missteps Jentz discovered in the official investigation, nothing about the case is open and shut. Jentz finds witnesses who contradict one another, who contradict previous statements, and people who made claims but have been influenced by the gossip around town in the two decades since the crime. Her research is exhaustive, and she accepts nothing at face value. The author should be commended for her dedication to factual accuracy (she refused to accept hearsay); however, the extreme detail does weigh the action down partway through the book. As an armchair detective, I would have gladly accepted a more condensed version of interviews. This is still, without question, a 5-star narrative that succeeds both as a personal memoir and as a criminal case study.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An epic American journey, May 7, 2006

By	Aaron Edelstein "Aaron Edelstein" (California) - See all my reviews

I picked up this book after seeing several very good reviews. While it's not the kind of thing I normally read and I was a bit wary of the length, I'm very glad I gave it a chance. Jentz is a brave and beautiful writer. The book works on so many levels. It's the investigation of a crime, but it's so much more. Jentz wrestles with an American ethos that glorifies violence and refuses to acknowledge the suffering of women. I know, that makes the book sound stuffy. But the author isn't writing a polemic. This is a very personal story, an attempt to recover a part of herself that was lost during the attack. There's a lot of detail and some very hard, dark material. In the end, though, I just couldn't stop reading, pulled along by the evolving mystery of who the perp was, and also the very touching story of the author's attempt to face the horror. Given the themes, the story, and the intense writing, I couldn't put the book down.