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Iodine: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Haven Kimmel
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  95 reviews
Sales Rank: 361884
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 1416572848
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781416572848
ASIN: 1416572848
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Former library book with usual markings. Two pages have large corner creases. Moderate wear to dust jacket and cover edges.
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 90 more reviews...
 Psychological Novel of a Woman with Psychosis January 8, 2009
A brillant woman at the top of her class in college is struggling with mental illness. She often writes in a dream journal, her fantasies and thoughts were are confusing and unclear. She becomes Ianthe Covington and marries another professor and lives a life of another person until her illness and a doctor begin to unravel her secret. This odd yet engrossing novel is difficult to describe. The point of view is from a person who is ill and not in their right state of mind. Just as people who are psychotic can't tell a full picture or story about their surroundings, this book is unclear what is truth and what is fantasy. To Trace Pennington, everything is true and untrue. Fantasy and reality meld into one.
 Left Me Split Down the Middle January 7, 2009
This book, appropriately enough, really has me split down the middle.
One hand, I hated it. It encompassed all of the hipster "too-cool-for-everyone" characteristics in the protagonist, Trace, that drive me bonkers. All those songs and musicians that everyone who "dares" to be different listens to? Yep, there in here. The "I so don't care about style everyone wants to copy mine" wardrobe? Yep, that's here, too. The "I'm smarter than everyone in the room" attitude? Got it. In that regard, Trace reminded me of several characters that literally made me want to bang my head against the wall.
However, other aspects of the book legitimately won my adoration. Heavily immersed in Greek mythology, literary criticism, as well as Freud and Jung's dream analyses, Kimmel presented well-researched and implemented information that played a vital and enjoyable role in the story. In fact, I so enjoyed her plot points concerning Jung and Freud, I checked out several of their books at my local library concerning dream analysis and archetypes.
Furthermore, Kimmel really is a good writer. Her characters are well rounded, she has a smooth writing style, and she's quite adept with figurative language. Seemingly pointless details later play significant aspects in the novel that point to Kimmel's careful attention to detail and forethought.
I personally also enjoyed Iodine because it struck me as a thinking person's novel. Consequently, I'm not sure how much the casual reader would appreciate that. Yes, at times it was a tad heavy-handed and haughty, but, as a one-time English major, I really dug all the allusions and unexpected twists.
In the end, Iodine has a little bit of bad and quite a bit of good, but, unless you get a kick out of looking up psychoanalytical terms and Greek mythological figures, this may not be the book for you.
~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant
A compelling voice, disappointing product January 7, 2009
I picked this to review for the Amazon Vine program because the synopsis was so intriguing in its reference to a young woman struggling with psychosis and insanity, but I may have gotten more than I bargained for in the end.
I knew it would be dark, and indeed it was. The protagonist begins as Trace Pennington, a literally-starving university student (psychology, no less) who lives in an abandoned house with her dog and a pile of journals. A few interactions indicate that she's in hiding, and it's not clear from who or what although glimpses of a horrific past come to light when least expected. As the story progresses, she becomes Ianthe, and it's never entirely clear if this is a purposeful change in identity in order to continue hiding, or if she's actually a multiple personality. Perhaps a combination of the two, because there is so much blurring of the lines of lucidity here that if the reader can't tell, maybe it's because the writer can't either.
The author weaves `dream journal' segments into the narrative, but both the journal and the story itself are so rambling and discordant that it becomes impossible to ferret out what is real and what is not. Was the dog real or a figment of imagination from the past? What DID happen between Trace and her beloved (too beloved) father? What actually happened to her brother Billy? Did she even have a brother? As Ianthe, she becomes involved with one of her professors and even marries him....I think. It's really not clear. The passages where Trace visits her old friend Candy, who is being horrifically beaten on a daily basis by whom we assume is her husband but she claims is an alien, are compelling but confusing.
I was able - I think - to get glimpses of truth here and there, but it was like picking sand out of the carpet and in the end I was left deeply dissatisfied. I haven't read anything by this young author before, but I've heard that her previous novel, A Girl Named Zippy, was very well-received and of a completely different nature than this dark and complex tale. Kimmel obviously has tremendous potential and talent, and that's what leaves me more frustrated than anything. She seems to have a perception of people, especially in the surreal world of academia, that is dead-on, and her skill at bringing that out on paper is stunning and alone is almost worth the read. Even just a fractionally more lucid offering from her would be welcome.
I'm right in the Goldilocks middle on this one. I can't recommend it heartily due to my reservations about its structure and lack of clarity, but Kimmel does have a compelling style I'd like to get more of.
 Good writing; confusing plot January 5, 2009
This book illustrates what should be an obvious truth: that bad things happen when people read too much theory and don't laugh at it enough. Haven Kimmel has written at least one other wonderful, funny, unpretentious book, A Girl Named Zippy. But this one is pretentious and bad. Apparently the idea was to illustrate the archetypal theories of James Hillman. I've never read Hillman, but I've read Freud, Jung, and Northrop Frye, other theorists of the archetypal that she actually quotes more than she does Hillman. And I still can't figure out this crazy story.
It seems to be about a girl named either Tracey or Ianthe, who may or may not have had sex with her father. Fine, I could deal with ambiguous incest in Faulkner. But also, she may or may not have shot him and her brother and their dog, and been caught by the sheriff right afterwards, but not prosecuted. Instead she's in college, and she's a star, up until the time that she initiates an affair with a professor, who seems to be a jerk, but maybe not. Anyway she drops out in order to carry on this affair and marry him, just short of graduating summa cum laude. But this loss is not greatly lamented.
The dialogue between the protagonist and her professor lover is unbelievably stilted, academic, and silly, and it's the low point of the whole book. The professor may or may not have murdered his former wife and baby. Ianthe and the professor get married, for four months or four years.
To make up for the silly academic life scenes, there is a vivid picture of trailer trash life, with abduction by aliens, ritual Satanic abuse, crystal meth dealing, foster care, dirty trailers, and the whole sad rural working class poverty scene. Her description of this is the high point of the book. She knows it well, it seems.
If you can tolerate not knowing what happened, you might like this book. It's experimental all right, but not successfully, in my opinion.
Really Good... January 4, 2009
This is a very interesting book, it one of those where near every sentence has deeper meaning clues you just have to see it. You dont always know whats real and whats in Trace's mind a very troubled mind at that. She is very intelligent, beautiful and a bit crazy/delusional. Assuming you like it you will want to read it again and no doubt find many things you previously missed. Even if this is not your preferred genre you should not miss this one.
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