I’ve been haunted by the memory of this old novel my grandmother used to own and I read a couple of times when I was a teenager and just loved.
It’s about a girl named Jade whose father kills himself and whose mother is about as cold and unrelenting as humanly possible, quietly blaming Jade for her fathers suicide.
In high school, Jade is raped by three men. Ones name is Neil, I cant remember the other two. She conceives a child. She vows revenge on the three boys and leaves the town.
She meets a guy whose also had it pretty rough (his wife and son died by carbon monoxide poisoning after his wife had asked him to clean the heating filters and whatnot and he put it off till next week.)
Does this sound familiar to ANYONE??!
A hundred search engines queries have me convinced I thought the whole thing up. =(
You may have already tried this, but I’ve found the Alibris.com message boards helpful for this kind of question. They have a “lost books” forum and your description might ring a bell with someone.
Can you give us any kind of time frame on the copyright date? How old were you when you read it, when was that, etc.? If it was one of your grandmother’s novels, what would that make the copyright date? The plotline sounds a little lurid for the 1920s. Maybe after that?
I think it was written in the 80’s sometime. It was a paperback. It was meant to be modern-day. I think it took place somewhere in the South… If I remeber correctly, Neil’s dad had owned a huge Plantation.