Biting the Apple

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Biting the Apple is the story of Eve Glass, once an Olympic sprinter and now a motivational speaker. She s the author of two books, Going the Distance: Endurance for Achievers and If Grace is the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786719273
• ISBN13: 9780786719273
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Back to the Garden

My summer book this year was Biting the Apple, by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. She is one of those authors whose every book is different, so her market equity may not be as high as some of her "branded" colleagues, but pound for pound, Bledsoe's books are hard to beat. This one tells an unusual story of a strange love triangle, then complicates it by adding more characters and situations, and lays her story against the heady backdrop of competitive Olympic athletics. In a way, Biting the Apple reminded me of that long ago movie Personal Best, which must have been set around the same time, and the "tragedy" of Jimmy Carter forbidding America's teams from participating in the 1980 Olympics really scarred Bledsoe's heroine, Eve Glass. During the course of the book Eve reflects at the turn of events that shaped her life, from her discovery by a keen-eyed coach, to the buzz surrounding her appearance at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, to the present day when she is hitting bottom in a series of öh no" moments well scripted and fleshed out by Bledsoe, who seems incapable of a false or unwieldy sentence or motion. Over and over we her readers stand outside the book, tense as wire, longing to tell Eve Glass "Don't do it, things aren't so bad!" but Bledsoe takes us there to the end of the journey one unflinching page at a time. The overwhelming demand that her art makes in Biting the Apple, as in her other books, is to call attention to the pressures of the human. "You look scared," a kindly inmate tells her, when her "priors" bring her to a holding tank. "Just remember, you can't push the river." In a way, Bledsoe's twin struggles stem from a religious viewpoint, though whether or not she characterizes herself as a religious writer is moot. Through the prism of Eve "Glass" (like the family of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, an ironic name to use for one so cloudy and opaque), we see the longings to be seen for what one is, and contrariwise, we see how difficult such a quest is and what a pain in the neck one is seen as when one dares to disturb the social construction of sanity.