The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.
Audrey Rose
by [Kaeirdwyn]
"Audrey Rose"
By Frank De Felitta
Copyright 1975, published in 1976; reissued December 2001.
Book Review By [Kaeirdwyn]
Audrey Rose sounds like a nice, inviting book about pretty things or a nice, little, ordinary girl, yet that is nothing like what it is about. This book is about an ordinary seeming young girl named Ivy Templeton who is ten years old. She has nice parents and all the wonderful things that life can offer.
One day her mother notices a man at the school as she picks her daughter up and is frightened as she realizes this man is entranced by her daughter. However, it is not a sexual thing. He looks desperate. Why? He tells her that his name is Elliot Hoover and that he has been told by a psychic that her daughter is the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose, who died in a terrible car accident-- death by fire. She died banging her fists on the glass screaming for her daddy to save her. Janice, the mother, tells him to stay away. He, of course, does not. Would this not freak any mother out?
Then the unspeakable happens. Ivy begins to act strangely. She begins to have night terrors and nightmares, almost like a fugue state, that her mother cannot wake her from. In each instance she seems to suffer a horrible death, being trapped and burned alive. Her mother and father, Janice and Bill Templeton, at wits' end, are horrified and take her to doctors, to a priest, and finally to a psychiatrist who begins to detail the problems and tries hypnosis with horrifying results.
This time while in the trance-like state, she bangs on the windows of the high rise apartment screaming out her death agonies as her mother and father watch on, unable to do nothing, not even comfort her, because the cannot wake her. She then begins choking as if on smoke, but the doctor somehow pulls her out of the trance before she loses the ability to breath altogether. Finally pulled out of her trance, she has severe burns on her hands, for which there is no explanation. There was no heat on the windows she banged on and no heaters nearby. Poor Ivy has no recollection of what has happened once she is awakened and doesn't understand why there is such a fuss about her or how her hands have been burned.
Not knowing how to stop these terrors, Janice lets Elliot Hoover, who has claimed she was once his daughter, into the sessions with the psychiatrist. After being hypnotized again, Ivy runs around the room screaming and banging her fists, she yells for her daddy to save her over and over. "Daddydaddydad
dyhothothot!" The exact words that Audrey Rose screamed at the time of her death.
Though Janice feels she cannot trust Hoover, for some reason while in these fugue states, Ivy responds to his voice. She calms down, as he calls her Audrey Rose. She is able to hear him, though not her own parents. She crawls into his lap and falls asleep, clinging to the man as if he is her father, to the horror of her own parents, who are lost and confused at this behavior.
The fugue states progress rapidly and time is running out as Ivy starts choking on unseen smoke only found in her mind. Will they be able to stop the fugue states from taking over her life? Does this man have claim to Ivy, though she is not his daughter in this lifetime? Is she really reincarnated from his own daughter, Audrey Rose? Is she destined to replay the horrific events surrounding Audrey Rose's death her whole life or is there a way to end the torment to herself, her family and the man who remembers her as Audrey Rose? And if they end the torment to Audrey Rose's soul, what will happen to Ivy Templeton?
This book is a suspenseful thriller to the end and will entrance any reader. I found it entertaining and interesting to wonder if things like this could or do happen to people around the world today. Stranger things have probably happened.
I give it four stars out of five mainly for the originality of the subject material and for the fact that after eighteen years, I can still remember the story. Also, yes, there has been a movie made of this book, so if you do not read, yet are intrigued, the film is titled the same. On a side note, for those who decide to get this book and love it, I found while looking online that there is a sequel called For Love of Audrey Rose. Yes I plan to get it in the near future. Look for a review of that book in a future Town Herald.
Happy Reading, [Kaeirdwyn]
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