A Stone Gone Mad

by Jacqueline Holt Park

Faced with the scorn of her family after being discovered in the arms of a female classmate, sixteen-year-old Emily embarks on an emotional and painful sexual odyssey as she struggles to come to terms with her sexuality

Genres: Fiction, LGBT

336 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 1991

Reviews

[Dina]

I read this book in college, passed it on to other friends... We all loved it and talked about it. We are about to begin again and all read it over.... Very impactful book. I am excited to read it again after approx 14 years! I am sure I will get something totally different out of it this time around!

Synopsis by Library Journal:
Emily Stolle has always followed her heart, and when she is 16 years old it leads her to her sister's best friend Mattie--with calamitous results. This being the Fifties, the family's discovery of Emily and Mattie making love in a pile of autumn leaves leads to immediate reprisal: her stepmother leaves, her sister abandons her forever, and her father sends her immediately to a strict boarding school and an uncomprehending psychoanalyst. Emily struggles through years of trying to live "normally" and then years of trying to come to terms with her "perversion." The reader is swept along in her turbulent wake, suffering her pain and confusion with her, flinching at slights and cheering her on when she decides to stop living a lie. Park has exceptional command of language, plot, and character for a first novelist, speaking to the fears we all have of being different even as she illuminates the feelings of those ostracized for just that reason. Her subject is serious, while her smoothly paced writing has the effervescence of the best popular fiction.

[Suanne Laqueur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult (for me) story of a girl trying to come out of the closet in the 1960s

I found it difficult because it was so heartbreaking. Besides Emily’s wondering if she is sick or mentally ill, and her painful attempts to “cure” herself, there are the estrangements: first her family—her father sends her away and her sister refuses to allow contact between her daughter and “perverted” Aunt Emily. Then her friends distance themselves. Throughout Emily’s repeated bouts of depression, friends beg her to confide in them, whatever it is, they will understand. So she confides. And they either flee in denial or retreat in homophobic horror. Her one true champion, Lillian, is kept in the dark the whole time…

A review from Amazon.com wrote “ …a tangled mess of finding and defining oneself according to one's understanding of society's rules.”

It definitely got my feelings in a tangle. I couldn’t say if I liked it or not, but it stuck with me for a long time, afterwards. I guess you could say it upset me.

[Lauren Zablotny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book at least 5 times. It's incredible!

[Rhoda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The style of delivery is a bit distracting, first to narrator frequently, and some of the metaphors are hilarious, but this book grows on you and, by the end, you are glad you read it. At least I was. Her story is not my story but it is a real story, filled with loves and losses and, like real life, some things can not be fixed and one just has to go on with life. This was the author's first book and I think it was an excellent effort.