As She Walked Through The Shadow Of Death By Pamela B. Woods

770 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Domestic violence and its effects

As She Walked Through the Shadow of Death is a psychiatric thriller about the Winslow family. Annabel Winslow has what seems like the perfect life. She is married to a prominent psychiatrist, lives in a nice house, and has three beautiful children. In his practice her husband, Dr. Winslow, treats patients that have been involved in abusive relationships. This should make him the perfect husband, right? So why does Annabel feel so much anxiety when she is around her husband? Why does she end up with so many bruises and unexplained injuries?

We the readers find out that her husband has abused her. Even more shocking, he has hypnotized her to cover it up. She gets glimpses of memories here and there, but Dr. Winslow is an expert in manipulating her and hypnotizing her into forgetting the abuse and remembering only that she loves him. Will Annabel find the courage to leave her husband or will Dr. Winslow make the changes necessary to save his marriage?

I was really looking forward to reading this book as I enjoy reading a good psychiatric thriller. Even more than that, the thought of getting a glimpse into the mind of an abuser was interesting to me. Unfortunately, I was highly disappointed. The premise behind As She Walked Through the Shadow of Death is a good one, but it is …show more content…

Woods, decided to write this book in the third person omniscient point of view. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, it does get confusing for the reader as Ms. Woods hops from the mind of one character to the next with no warning. At times it leaves me with whiplash trying to figure out which character is narrating now. Along the same lines the characters are called by multiple names in the space of only one or two sentences. For example, Dr. Winslow is referred to as Robert, the Doctor, and Dr. Winslow all in a short time. I don't know if the author was trying to achieve variety, but she failed instead leaving us again confused as to who she was

Show More
Related

  • Dead And Gone By Norah Mcclintock: Summary

    204 Words  | 1 Pages

    The book I choose for the book talk is “Dead and gone” written by Norah McClintock, this book talks about a murder mystery of Tricey Howard. The main character of the story is Mike, an orphan whose parents got killed in a car crash. He lives with his foster father named John Riel, who was once a police officer. During a swim meet, Mike see Mr.Henderson is staring at a girl name Emily without stopping. Then he informs Emily about what happened in the community center. However, as return Emily blackmails Mike to investigate Mr. Henderson. During the investigation, Mike finds nothing suspicious, but realize Emily is the daughter of Tricey Howard. Tricey Howard was murdered years ago, but the police still haven’t find the real killer. At the meantime,

    Read More

  • April Henry's The Body In The Woods

    536 Words  | 2 Pages

    April Henry doesn’t really give a whole lot of information, at the beginning of the book. Throughout the book, you learn about the characters, where the setting is, learn about the plot, and about the moral of the story.

    Read More

  • Death Ushers Grief in “Whoever We Are, Loss Finds us and Defines Us” by Anna Quindlen

    849 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “Whoever We Are, Loss Finds us and Defines Us”, by Anna Quindlen, she brings forth the discussion grief's grip on the lives of the living. Wounds of death can heal with the passing of time, but in this instance, the hurt lives on. Published in New York, New York on June 5, 1994, this is one of many Quindlen published in the New York Times, centered on death's aftermath. This article, written in response to the death of Quindlen’s sister-in-law, and is focused on an audience who has, currently is, or will experience death. Quindlen-a columnist for the New York Times and Newsweek, Pulitzer Prize winner and author-has written six bestselling novels (Every Last One, Rise and Shine, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue) and has been published in the New York Times and Newsweek.

    Read More

  • Judith Ortiz Cofer's The Story Of My Body

    119 Words  | 1 Pages

    In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Story of My Body” Ortiz Cofer represents herself narrative story when she were young. Her autobiography has four headlines these parts are skin, color, size, and looks. Every headline has it is own stories underneath it. Ortiz Cofer’s is expressing her life story about her physical and psychological struggle with her body. Heilbrun’s narrative, “Writing a Woman’s Life” shows that, a woman’s does not have to be an ideal to write a self-autobiography to tell the world something about herself and her life. Ortiz Cofer’s facing a body struggle that is not made by herself, but by people around her. Therefore, every woman is able to write can write an autobiography with no exception.

    Read More

  • Perseverance In A Worn Path By Eudora Welty

    358 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the short story "A Worn Path," the message that Eudora Welty sends to the readers is one of love, endurance, persistence, and perseverance. Old Phoenix Jackson walks a long way to town, through obstacles of every sort, but no obstacle is bad enough to stop her from her main goal. She may be old and almost blind, but she knows what she has to do and won't give up on it. Her grandson has swallowed lye, and she has a holy duty of making her way to town in order to get medicine for him. The wilderness of the path does not scare her off. She stumbles over and over, but she talks herself through every obstacle. Undoubtedly, the theme of perseverance is what Eudora Welty wants to point out to her readers. Just like the name Phoenix suggests

    Read More

  • The Yellow Wallpaper Analysis

    776 Words  | 2 Pages

    It is clear that in their marriage, her husband makes her decisions on her behalf and she is expected to simply follow blindly. Their relationship parallels the roles that men and women play in marriage when the story was written. The narrator’s feelings of powerlessness and submissive attitudes toward her husband are revealing of the negative effects of gender roles. John’s decision to treat the narrator with rest cure leads to the narrator experiencing an intense feeling of isolation, and this isolation caused her mental decline. Her descent into madness is at its peak when she grows tears the wallpaper and is convinced that “[she’s] got out at last, in spite of [John] and Jennie… and [they] can’t put her back!”

    Read More

  • Death and Reality in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

    1268 Words  | 3 Pages

    Death and Reality in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates

    Read More

  • Death And Grieving By Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

    1953 Words  | 4 Pages

    Death and Grieving Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss.

    Read More

  • Importance of Setting and Wallpaper in The Yellow Wallpaper

    1463 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...f the bad that is going on in her real life, so she would have a happy place to live. With the collapse of her happy place her defense was gone and she had no protection from her insanity anymore. This caused all of her blocked out thoughts to swarm her mind and turn her completely insane. When the doctor found her, he tried to go in and help her. When the doctor finally got in he fainted because he had made so many positive changes with her and was utterly distressed when he found out that it was all for naught. This woman had made a safety net within her mind so that she would not have to deal with the reality of being in an insane asylum, but in the end everything failed and it seems that what she had been protecting herself from finally conquered her. She was then forced to succumb to her breakdown and realize that she was in the insane asylum for the long run.

    Read More

  • The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

    1853 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is about the cross-cultural ethics in medicine. The book is about a small Hmong child named Lia Lee, who had epilepsy. Epilepsy is called, quag dab peg1 in the Hmong culture that translates to the spirit catches you and you fall down. In the Hmong culture this illness is sign of distinction and divinity, because most Hmong epileptics become shaman, or as the Hmong call them, txiv neeb2. These shamans are special people imbued with healing spirits, and are held to those having high morale character, so to Lia's parents, Foua Yang and Nao Kao Lee, the disease was both a gift and a curse. The main question in this case was could Lia have survived if her parent's and the doctors overcame the miscommunication, cultural racism, and the western way of medicine.

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman

    943 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down tells the story of a young Hmong girl stricken with epilepsy, her family, her doctors, and how misunderstandings between cultures can lead to tragedy. The title comes from the Hmong term for epilepsy, which translated, is “the spirit catches you and you fall down”. Anne Fadiman alternates between chapters on Hmong history or culture and chapters on the Lees, and specifically Lia. The condensed history of the Hmong portrayed here starts at their beginning, and traces their heritage, their movements, and why they do what they do as they flee from enemies to country to country. This record allows the reader to better understand the Lees and their situation without bogging him down with details that may

    Read More

  • An Acquaintance with Darkness by Ann Rinaldi

    1482 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ann Rinaldi has written many books for young teenagers, she is an Award winning author who writes stories of American history and makes them become real to the readers. She has written many other books such as… A Break with Charity, A Ride into Morning, and Cast two Shadows, etc. She was born in New York City on August 27, 1934. In 1979, at the age of 45, she finished her first book.

    Read More

  • My Childhood Fear Was Dying By Laurie E. Hutzler

    801 Words  | 2 Pages

    In any good story, the main character must be a complex, human ecse character; flaws and all. Among these flaws must be the one thing that drives them to do the things that they do, their wound per say. My character’s childhood fear was dying. This fear would not necessarily have a large impact on their life, however it could represent something much more sinister, something like the fear of the unknown. This fear would drive someone’s life because someone might not know what it’s like to be in a relationship so they would then fear getting into one.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Self Expression In The Yellow Wallpaper

    888 Words  | 2 Pages

    Gilman shows through this theme that when one is forced to stay mentally inactive can only lead to mental self-destruction. The narrator is forced into a room and told to be passive, she is not allowed to have visitors, or write, or do much at all besides sleep. Her husband believes that a resting cure will rid her of her “slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 478). Without the means to express herself or exercise her mind in anyway the narrator begins to delve deeper and deeper into her fantasies. The narrator begins to keep a secret journal, about which she states “And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief” (Gilman 483)! John tells his wife that she must control her imagination, lest it run away with her. In this way John has asserted full and complete dominance over his wife. The narrator, though an equal adult to her husband, is reduced to an infancy. In this state the narrator begins her slow descent into hysteria, for in her effort to understand herself she fully and completely loses herself.

    Read More

  • The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

    1838 Words  | 4 Pages

    The one of the main themes in the epilogue, and in the entire novel is

    Read More

More about As She Walked Through The Shadow Of Death By Pamela B. Woods

Open Document