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    Iodine: A Novel
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    Iodine: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Iodine: A Novel
    Ebook255 pages4 hours

    Iodine: A Novel

    By Haven Kimmel

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Haven Kimmel, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, has long attracted legions of fans for her insightful, humane portraits of outsiders struggling to find their place in the world. In Iodine, her fourth novel, Kimmel once again draws on her exceptional powers of observation and empathy, but this time she makes an exhilarating foray into psychological gothic territory with the electrifying story of a young woman emerging from layers of delusion, fantasy, and lies. With her astounding intelligence, fierce independence, and otherworldly lavender eyes, college senior Trace Pennington makes an indelible impression even as questions about her past and her true identity hover over every page.

    From her earliest years, Trace turned away from her abusive mother toward her loving father. Within the twisty logic of abuse, her desperate love for him took on a romantic cast that persists to this day, though she's had no contact with her family since she ran away from home years ago. Alone but for her beloved dog, she's eked out an impoverished but functional existence, living in an abandoned house, putting herself through college, and astonishing her teachers with her genius and erudition. What they don't know is that she leads a double life: thanks to forged documents, at school she is Ianthe Covington, a young woman with no past.

    Trace's singular life is upended when she and her literature professor fall in love. She tells him nothing about her life, and as it becomes apparent that he has his own dark secrets, she's forced to face herself and her past. After recovering a horrific, long-suppressed memory, Trace finally copes with the fallout from her brutal, bizarre childhood. Kimmel parcels out Trace's strange, dark story in mesmerizing bits that obscure as much as they reveal, and keep the reader guessing until the end.

    With Kimmel's radiant imagination, lyrical prose, and vision of a bleak and fertile Midwest on full display, Iodine is a frightening and marvelous tale of life at the outer extremes of human experience. This unique portrait of the psychological effects of trauma is tantalizing, shocking, and ultimately hopeful.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFree Press
    Release dateAug 5, 2008
    ISBN9781416573104
    Unavailable
    Iodine: A Novel
    Author

    Haven Kimmel

    Haven Kimmel is the author of The Used World, She Got Up Off the Couch, Something Rising (Light and Swift), The Solace of Leaving Early, and A Girl Named Zippy. She studied English and creative writing at Ball State University and North Carolina State University and attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Durham, N.C.

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    Reviews for Iodine

    3.5/5

    68 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Holy. Crap. This book was amazing. I don't even have words right now to talk about it, really. Structurally innoative, linguistically divine, this is a mind fuck of a book that impressed me in ways contemporary literature rarely has been able to do.
    • 2/5
      This book is written in dream journals and stream of conciousness; not something I am used to. As the reader you never knew what was true and what just happened in Trace's head. No questions are answered even at the end. It is beautiful yet terrifying.
    • 3/5
      Something that becomes clear from the moment you start this novel is that Haven Kimmel is brilliant. She could be part of a new species of evolved humans who sit around philosophizing all day, finding a new way to live. At it's heart, this book is an adventurous journey into rural Indiana where conservative religious fanaticism, alien/extra-terrestrial encounters, mental illness, feminism, philosophy, crystal meth, and Kate Bush all manage to collide. Every page is a bit intriguing but it's also a huge train wreck that doesn't make too much sense, either. I like Haven Kimmel's writing but I think she needed to develop the cohesiveness of this novel better and I prefer The Solace of Leaving Early a great deal more because of it.
    • 3/5
      "Iodine" was a difficult to book for me to read both its subject matter and the style in which it was presented. The book jacket tells us that we are faced with an "unreliable narrator." My book club has a long conversation about this. The opinions were mixed. I felt the story line was strong, but the main characters extremely damaged. Trace was a woman with extreme mental health issues, living alone, with only her dog, in an old farmhouse and her mind in her own time and place. Her reality wasn't the same as others. She was hiding from her parents and like wise the rest of the world. There is also the person Ianthe who is Trace in the outside world, like the college she attends where she is a bright student, especially in the ares of literature and psychology. The writing of her"dream journals," brings in her past and helps expand the fuller character of Trace. It wasn’t easy for me to know whether Trace was in the past, the present or a mixed up world of dreams and fantasies. Even the relationship she becomes involved seemed half real and half delusional. I have read other books by Kimmel and will continue to do so but they are not always comfortable or easy to follow.
    • 2/5
      Wish I hadn't read this. The author's experimental style tries accomodate the dishonest, undependable narrative voice of a character who experiences epileptic seizures, transient global amnesia and fugue states presumably because of the psychological effects of childhood trauma and abuse. The story is redeemed by the author's voice when she treads the everyday familiar scenes of her characters environs but even so the lingering taste is somewhat foul.
    • 4/5
      Trace Pennington is a brilliant young woman living in Indiana who is a senior in college living under an assumed identity, Ianthe Covington, that she "stole" from a gravestone. Trace is also mentally unbalanced due to some horrific things that happened in her childhool and which come out slowly in the book as the author takes us into Trace's memories of the past. The book is extremely well-written with not a wasted word. The only negative comments I have are that I felt the reader had to be an English major to understand parts of the book, and I also didn't quite understand the alien piece, which just seemed to be ramblilngs by the author. Other than that, I enjoyed the book very much.
    • 4/5
      “Iodine” is extremely different than the other books I've read by Haven Kimmel. I've read the stories about her childhood with a mixture of laughter and awe and I've read the other fiction works with admiration of her beautiful prose.This book..this book is a bit like tracing your finger through a pile of clear glass shards. They are beautiful as they reflect the light and the feel is cool to the touch...but every once in a while, a shard cuts deep underneath the skin, slicing clean through and drawing tiny drops of blood.I'm not 100% sure exactly what happened in this book, but given the narrator, I think that's the point. There is a river of sadness and uncertainty and fear and desperate love flowing from the very first words, with an undercurrent of constant pain.“Trace got in her truck, slammed the door a second time. Dusty was still standing on the porch. She twitched once, and eloquent lift of the shoulders that was, for Trace, the sum of every individual loss.”This young woman's story contains so many unknowns, even to her. Sometimes it is as if she is living several lives at once, sometime she appears to not even be living her own. Her attempts to move away from her past prove heartbreaking. Every experience seems tied to her past and even new people she meets seem determined to pull her back.When she meets Jacob, a professor at the university from which she is close to graduating, events seem to come to a head. This man, who seems to represent her future, takes her yet again back to the emotions of her abusive past.“This was a man who was a physician of the secrets buried in texts; he peeled away old layers and fabrications; he tore down the moldy velvet theater curtain and exposed the bare stage and then told those dull and witless children in his classes that the stage was true, it made life worth living, it was the floor of civilization.”Trace, a young woman so unsure of the facts of her own past, becomes entangled Jacob's...to her own further detriment. “He had been motionless before the question and he remained motionless, and yet every atom in the room shifted, scattered so as not to be seen.”I know there was so much that I missed in this book. I am sure that I will re-read it someday and find some further insight into this character, this story.But for now, I simply admire the beautiful shards of words and emotion, and wonder at Kimmel's grace at bending the light.
    • 5/5
      Iodine has got to be the best book I've read in 20 years. Kimmel uses an unreliable narrator to shocking effect. While Trace descends into madness, the reader struggles to untangle the threads of this story, but is rewarded by some of the most achingly beautiful prose that has ever been put to paper. This is an amazing, fantastic, whirlwind of a character study with an explosive ending.I read this book last year and it has stayed with me like no other. An absolutely stunning 5-star read.
    • 2/5
      Underneath all the psychobabble which was all quite over my head, was an interesting, albeit confusing story. Ianthe (Trace) had a traumatic childhood, the full extent of which you don't find out until the very end, which affects her life, of course. There are side stories about alien abduction and people she knew growing up, and I'm not really sure what actually happened to these people... One theory/idea I was enthralled with was that of "technological angels".. which I am going to do more research on. I probably wouldn't recommend this book unless it was someone with a psychology degree...
    • 5/5
      Heartbreaking.Amazing. I loved it.
    • 5/5
      IodineBy Haven KimmelFree PressISBN: 978-1-4165-7284-8221 PagesIodine by Haven Kimmel, New York Times bestselling author, was a very disturbing book for me. I could not say I liked it, but I feel compelled to give it high praise for what Kimmel has created in this portrayal of her character, Trace Pennington. If you dare--enter her psychotic mind: "I never I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed." (p. 1) The majority of Iodine comes to us in the form of journals. The excerpt above is how Kimmel opens her novel. Certainly attention getting--certainly a setup of what may be coming. Whether or not any of the interactions between Trace and her family members ever really happened, we cannot be sure of--what we do know for sure is that Trace Pennington believed everything that she wrote--at the time she wrote it. The false starts, again as demonstrated above, are also accompanied by failure to finish thoughts, beginning new thoughts in the middle of others, and various sidetracks of her ongoing thoughts. Trace has a form of epilepsy that is not discovered, or even considered, until late in her life. Once she is medicated, she begins to realize and investigate what has been happening to her. Where does a brilliant woman escape to when she is delusional or hallucinating? Even earlier, and perhaps more critical--where does she go to escape abuse from her own mother, who described her as a changeling? Readers enter Trace's life during her time at university. She has created a persona, Ianthe Covington, who is now considering various Honors courses that will not only complete her degree but also provide her various minors in fields such as Women's Studies. It is quite obvious that she has read far beyond all requirements and, in fact, has exceeded the experience of some of her professors. Indeed, readers quickly become aware of the brilliance of the author, even though it is bizarrely portrayed through her central character. While Ianthe is steadily moving toward her degree, Trace has left home and lives in an abandoned house with little money. It is there where she writes of visiting the Underworld, to meet with Pluto or Hekate. Or she might share her dreams and then her own interpretation of those dreams--or what interpretation Freud or Jung might provide. Trace's mind seems to never stop and readers are thrown page by page into Greek mythology to Jung to Freud and back to Jung. Fortunately, Trace has Weeds as her totem, to provide stabilization to her life--her beloved dog, given to her by her beloved father...until... One day, Ianthe sees and meets her "fate." He is one of her professors, Jacob Matthias. And, so, she discovers where he lives, goes there and waits on an outside porch until he comes home...to tell him so. Surprisingly, she just might be right this time! Indeed, she doesn't know how fateful he has been until, perhaps, the day she hears a doctor ask him how long they had been married. In her mind, she tried to say, four months. But she hears, surprised, when he responds "Four years and four months to the day." (p. 202) Once I made it through some of her journal entries, I had become absorbed into Trace's life. It is then fascinating to sit back and watch her internal thoughts within the academic community, and her overwhelming brilliance as she explores Hades or her dreams and/or hallucinations of her parents. There is a realism that is beyond comprehension for many of us, yet the author has indeed placed us directly into the mind of this woman! It is truly amazing. It is disturbing. It is horrible. It is wondrous... But no matter what, for me, Haven Kimmel's Iodine is one of the most memorable books I have ever read and it will continue to haunt me! Outstanding writing! G. A. Bixler
    • 4/5
      I may (will) give this a higher rating after I re-read it, though the re-read will have to be after I read some of the Freud/Jungian referenced books (which I intend to do). It is very difficult to make all the connections necessary to really understand Trace's life since the story is told from her psycotic point of view, and the pieces are just not all there - which is part of Kimmel's brilliance. The parts I did "get" were lovely, disturbing, funny, tragic -- wonderful. I'm a HUGE Haven Kimmel fan and really look forward to her next book.
    • 4/5
      In this book, Havel Kimmel sets out to describe one young woman's decent into madness. She succeeds brilliantly. I did not always understand Iodine, nor did I want to. It's the kind of book that should be read at a fast pace to appreciate all the twists and turns. I intend to re-read it more slowly to savor the philosophical discussions and quirky trains-of-thought that illustrate a brain that works in a different way from my own. Loved it.
    • 4/5
      Haven Kimmel's lastest book, Iodine, is a sharp, gripping read! It is the story of Trace, a young college student, who is slowly going mad. Other books I have read on the subject of madness left me mostly confused and with no other strong emotion. Iodine is truly terrifying as it follows every twist of Trace's life. I felt like I was right there with her trying to make sense of a world slowly losing focus. I was breathless waitng for the end which came with an explosive and shocking surprise. Don't expect the redemptive ending of Kimmel's "Solace of Leaving Early". This is a seering look at madness.