Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 1998: "The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old," begins Fran Benedetto, the broken heroine of Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue. With one sweeping sentence, the door to an abused and tortured world is swung wide open and the psyche of a crushed and tattered self-image exposed. "Frannie, Frannie, Fran"--as Bobby Benedetto liked to call her before smashing her into kitchen appliances--was a young, energetic nursing student when she met her husband-to-be at a local Brooklyn bar. She was instantly captivated by his dark, brooding looks and magnetic personality, but her fascination soon solidified into a marital prison sentence of incessant abuse and the destruction of her own identity. After an especially horrific beating and rape, Fran realizes that the next attack could be the last. Fearing her son would be left alone with Bobby, she escapes one morning with her child. Fran's salvation comes in the form of Patty Bancroft and Co., a relocation agency for abused women that touts better service than the witness protection program. Armed only with a phone number, a few hundred dollars, and the help of several anonymous volunteers, Fran begins a new life. The agency relocates her to Florida, where she becomes Beth Crenshaw, a recently divorced home-care assistant from Delaware. Fran and her son adapt, meeting challenges with unexpected resilience and resolve until their past returns to haunt them. Quindlen renders the intricacies of spousal abuse with eerie accuracy, taking the reader deep within the realm of dysfunctional human ties. However, her vivid descriptions of abuse, emotional disintegration, and acute loneliness at times numb the reader with their realism.


From School Library Journal
YA?This powerfully written story grips readers from the very first page. Fran and Bobby are crazy about one another from the moment they first meet, but his violent nature reveals itself even before they are married. Later, the "accidents" become more and more frequent and harder to hide: a broken collarbone, a split lip, a black eye. Finally, Fran escapes the abusive marriage, but by then she is damaged both inside and out. Assisted by a group that aids battered women, she flees with her 10-year-old son, Robert, who knows the truth but is reluctant to believe that the father who loves him so much could beat his mother so badly. Fran begins a new life with a new identity, but she lives in fear, knowing that Bobby won't rest until he finds them. Also, Robert longs for his father. Love between parent and child, coming to grips with the difference between passion and love, the importance of honesty in relationships, and self-knowledge as an essential part of healing?YAs can learn much about these and other themes in this novel about a shattered family and a strong woman determined to rebuild her life.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Actress Lili Taylor reads this riveting new work by New York Times columnist Quindlen, who has accepted the most difficult of challenges writing about domestic spousal abuse and crafted a warm, sympathetic, and sometimes funny novel. Fran Benedetto, the story's narrator, flees from a violent and abusive husband to start a new life under an assumed name. With her is their son, and Fran knows that her husband, a policeman, will exploit every resource at his disposal to find them and get the boy back. The characters are drawn with sympathy and understanding, and Taylor invests the protagonist with just the right mixture of pluck and vulnerability. Highly recommended for all public libraries.?John Owen, Advanced Micro Devices, Santa Clara, CACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


People, Jill Smolowe
...Anna Quindlen demonstrates the same winning qualities that inform her journalism: close observation, well-reasoned argument and appealing economy of language.... this portrait of a battered woman is intimate and illuminating and, as is true of most anything Quindlen writes, well worth the read.


The New York Times Book Review, Maggie Paley
Perhaps Quindlen intended to use Black and Blue as a way to dramatize the gravity of domestic violence; unfortunately, the novel is nowhere near as convincing as the news reports all of us have seen on television. But it does keep the reader anxiously turning pages.


From AudioFile
Repeatedly beaten by her husband, a Brooklyn cop, Fran Benedetto secretly relocates to Florida with her 10-year-old son. As Beth, she starts a new life--complete with job, friends and love interest. It's only a matter of time, of course, before she's found, with heart-wrenching consequences. Telling the story five years later, Fran/Beth still sounds like a victimized, shell-shocked Northerner. Despite the many good things that have since happened, she can't get by the sadness in her life. Reader Taylor does better with New York City accents than she does with small-town Southern. Gaps in time, perhaps caused by the abridgment, could have been made clearer by pauses. These reservations notwithstanding, this is a powerful tale credibly told. J.B.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Pulitzerwinning columnist and novelist Quindlen (One True Thing, 1994, etc.) now takes a talk-show staplespousal abuseand gives it a compelling immediacy in a refreshingly wise and truth- telling novel about life and marriage. Frannie, a nurse, fell deeply in love with Bobby, a handsome New York cop who at the time seemed attractively ``tasty and dangerous,'' as well as kind and thoughtful. But after 17 years of marriage, Bobby has become more dangerous than appealing. Tired of being beaten up, and now coping with a broken nose, Fran takes her ten-year-old son Robert and flees their Brooklyn home. Helped by a women's organization, she and Robert are given new identities and a new place to live: a duplex in Florida. Now known as Beth Crenshaw, Frannie also tries to make a new life for herself and Robert, whom she loves with a fierce and protective devotion. She finds a good friend in the resilient Cindy and a satisfying job as a visiting health aide. She grows close to her patients, especially Mrs. Levitt, a Holocaust survivor. But Frannie can't relax her vigilance: Bobby has resources and investigating tools that might make it easy to find her, and so while her life is increasingly normalshe dates Mike, Robert's nice soccer coachshe's still afraid. The tension is nail-biting but nicely complemented by perceptive insights, as in Frannie's meditation that ``whenever I thought about leaving, I thought about leaving my house . . . balloon shades and miniblinds . . . mugs for the coffee . . . small things; routine, order that's what kept me there for the longest time.'' Inevitably, Bobby catches up with her and exacts a terrible revenge, but an appropriately bittersweet ending gives Fran, who'll always wonder whether she was right to flee, a new love and life. Quindlen writes about women as they really areneither helpless victims nor angry polemicists, but intelligent human beings struggling to do what's right for those they love and for themselves. A book to read and savor. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A magazine columnist once criticized Anna Quindlen for "arguing strenuously" in her New York Times Op-Ed column that "spousal abuse was bad." Well, there's nothing strenuous or argumentative about Quindlen's new novel Black and Blue. Narrated with a reserve and precision that lets the story speak for itself, it is a compelling account of one very troubled family and stands as eloquent testimony to the devastating consequences of domestic violence.

Domestic life has served as Quindlen's touchstone in much of her journalism and all of her fiction. With her third novel, the first to be published since she quit The New York Times in 1994, she has pried apart the bulwark of the family to expose one of its dirtiest little secrets. Despite the 1990s sensibility that allows us to talk openly about all kinds of subjects that were once taboo—breast cancer, incest, drunk driving—domestic abuse remains shrouded in an old-fashioned prudishness. But any reporter who has thumbed through a day's worth of complaints at a police precinct, as Quindlen no doubt has, knows that most of them are dispassionate accounts of the brutality that regularly passes between husbands and wives.

The family that Quindlen sketches for us is a familiar stereotype for domestic abuse. Bobby Benedetto is a second-generation Italian cop from Brooklyn, the type who worships his mama (especially her red sauce), describes his father as "some piece of work," and peppers his remarks with casual bigotry. He's also a fanatical bodybuilder who enjoys his liquor. Fran easily fits the role of quiet, dutifulwife. She marries at 21, bears a son, works as a hospital nurse. This is just the kind of family where the husband would smack his wife around in the kitchen because she criticized one of his friends, and the wife would call in sick to work until the bruises healed. But instead of undermining her story, Quindlen's decision to play to type enriches it. The fact that the story she has chosen to tell is so typical is what gives it so much power.

Quindlen's narration skillfully mines her story for the strongest emotional impact. She opens the book by thrusting us into her subject—"The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old"—then pulls back and takes a good long time to fill in the details of that declaration, as Fran studies her marriage from a crummy apartment in a dusty strip mall city in Florida called Lake Plata. She has finally left Bobby—running off one morning with one duffel bag and her ten-year-old son, Robert, in hand, without the slightest idea where she is headed. Her disappearance is engineered by Patty Bancroft, the chief of a supersecret network of volunteers that helps abused wives vanish.

As Fran Benedetto becomes Elizabeth Crenshaw and goes about constructing a new life built on an invented biography, she allows herself to plunge into the truth about her old life. Quindlen does a masterful job of demonstrating how every aspect of Fran's existence has been distorted by her husband's abuse without ever letting the story slip into movie-of-the-week melodrama or holier-than-thou preachiness.

On the outside I looked fine: the job, the house, the kid, the husband, the smile. Nobody got to see the hitting, which was really the humiliation, which turned into the hatred. Not just hating Bobby, but hating myself, too, the cringing self that was afraid to pick up the remote control from the coffee table in case it was just the thing that set him off...I stayed because I wanted my son to have a father and I wanted a home. For a long time I stayed because I loved Bobby Benedetto, because no one had ever gotten to me the way he did. I think he knew that. He made me his accomplice in what he did, and I made Robert mine. Until that last time, when I knew I had to go, when I knew that if I told my son I'd broken my nose, blacked my eyes, split my lip, by walking into the dining-room door in the dark, that I would have gone past some point of no return. The secret was killing the kid in him and the woman in me, what was left of her. I had to save him, and myself.

Quindlen is particularly good at capturing the details of a life dominated by abuse, like Bobby not wearing his wedding ring anymore because it once split Fran's skin when he punched her. "I guess you could consider it considerate, that he didn't want that to happen again," Fran thinks. "But of course, it implied that there would be an again." Methodically, she illuminates every corner of Fran's life, until we see it with horrifying clarity. Fran isn't some amalgam of abuse victims in a brochure—she's a fully formed woman, and when we read about her getting her collarbone smashed or struggling to set her broken nose by herself, the devastation we feel for her is real. Just as palpable is the shadow that dims every day of her new life: the very real possibility that Bobby will find her. He lies just beyond sight at her son's soccer games, concealed behind the shrubs outside her apartment building, lurking in a crowd of people at the mall. We know, as does Fran, that he must be looking for her (though Quindlen never tells us for sure), and that menacing presence gives the story real tension and suspense. It also paves the way for a very realistic—and very shattering—finale.

One of the novel's sweetest scenes takes place on Fran's first Thanksgiving in her bare new apartment. After a miserable lunch at a restaurant, she and her son spend the afternoon creating a mosaic on Robert's closet door with a pile of clippings from old Sports Illustrateds and a pot of wallpaper paste. "This is the coolest thing we've ever done," Robert exults. We are just as grateful as Fran for that hour of pure joy. Black and Blue is more than a powerful illustration of the insidiousness of domestic abuse. It is also a gripping story of one woman's courage in the face of terror, an ordinary woman who finds the will to reclaim her life.
—Jennifer Greenstein

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For eighteen years, Fran Benedetto kept her secret. And hid her bruises. And stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father. And because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice—and ran for both their lives.—

Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. And in this place she uses a name that isn't hers, and cradles her son in her arms, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up to her. Because Bobby always said he would never let her go. And despite the flawlessness of her escape, Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: It is only a matter of time.—

SYNOPSIS

The courage that drove her groundbreaking New York Times op-ed page column surfaces in Anna Quindlen's third work of fiction, Black And Blue.

This is a stunning story about marriage, propelled by carefully crafted suspense and the believable and sympathetic character of Fran Benedetto. As Quindlen described to Matt Lauer on the set of NBC's "Today" program minutes before I sat down to talk with her, relationships are all about power. From the margin of domestic violence, Quindlen reveals the less poisonous power struggles inherent in all relationships.

Rarely the subject of fiction, domestic violence resonates under Quindlen's refined lens in the black and blues of Fran Benedetto. An instinctive caregiver, Fran enlists the services of an underground relocation service, not to save herself from her husband's brutality but to protect Robert, her son. The safety achieved in this harrowing escape is imperiled by Fran's sense of her abandoned husband's inflamed passion -- creaks in the night and unfamiliar figures manifest her greatest fear.

Despite constant misgivings and longings for the comfort of her old routine, Fran has clearly made the right decision. For the first time, readers may understand why a woman endures the bruises, broken bones, and rape inflicted by her husband, and so the difficulty in Fran's decision is illuminated. Hers is never the character of passive victim. However, as in Quindlen's journalism, and as in life, the ending provides no respite from reality -- it is bittersweet, terrifying, and transfixing.

FROM THE CRITICS

Laura Green - Salon

"Enjoyment" may seem an odd word to use in connection with a novel about a woman running from a husband of 17 years who has, on various occasions, blackened her eyes, split her lip, cracked her collarbone and broken her nose. Yet enjoyment, in the form of a gripping tale with a sympathetic protagonist, is precisely what Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue offers its readers. I read Black and Blue from beginning to end in one insomniac sitting.

When Quindlen's protagonist, Fran Benedetto, realizes that domestic terror is destroying not only her own life, but her 10-year-old son Robert's as well, she decides to leave behind her existence as a policeman's wife and emergency-room nurse in all-too-cozy Italian-American Brooklyn. "I'm a nurse, you know," Benedetto reflects, in one of her attempts to understand her long-delayed departure, "and a Catholic girl, a mother and the wife of a man who wanted to suck the soul out of me and put it in his pocket. I'm not real good at doing things for myself. But for Robert? That was a different story." She turns to Patty Bancroft, a woman who openly runs a kind of battered women's Witness Protection Program, providing false identification papers and new lives. The novel opens with Fran in a Philadelphia train station, awaiting Bancroft's anonymous connections, who provide the train tickets, bus tickets and car rides that will lead Fran, now "Beth Crenshaw," to a cramped duplex in a dusty Florida town.

The all-powerful organization that rescues Fran is implausible; resources available to battered women consist more frequently of underfunded shelters, overwhelmed social services and unenforced restraining orders. But beginning Fran's story with her decisive break is a shrewd choice, for Black and Blue attempts to give vigor to a figure -- the abused wife -- too often represented as a passive victim. Indeed, the novel's considerable strength is less its plot than its compelling first-person voice. Fran is a likable narrator, neither sentimental nor self-blaming about her own choices: "Sometimes as much as leaving Bobby I thought about leaving my house. Balloon shades and miniblinds and the way I felt at night sleeping on my extra-firm mattress under my own roof that we had hot-tarred the year after Robert was born -- all of it helped keep me there ... Small things: routine, order ... That, and love. That, and fear ... of winding up in some low-rent apartment subdivision with a window that looked out on a wall."

Like other contemporary domestic novelists, such as Anne Tyler and Anne Lamott, Quindlen balances her readers' longing to experience the protagonist's triumph with the knowledge that to end by simply rewarding virtue would betray the very realism we enjoy. Hampered by the need for secrecy, Fran slowly overcomes impoverishment, loneliness and fear to make new emotional connections. But the price she pays for this triumph is terrible, and all too real.

New York Times

Beautifully paced...keeps the reader axiously turning the pages.

Boston Globe

Quindlen writes with...power and grace.

Publishers Weekly

After two fine earlier efforts, Object Lessons and One True Thing, Quindlen has written her best novel yet in this unerringly constructed and paced, emotionally accurate tale of domestic abuse. Her protagonist is Frannie Benedetto, a 37-year-old Brooklyn housewife, mother and nurse who finally finds the courage to escape from her violent husband Bobby, a New York City cop. Under an assumed identity in a tacky central Florida town, Frannie and her 10-year-old son, Robert, attempt to build a new life, but there is a price to pay, and when it comes, it carries the heartstopping logic of inevitability and the irony of fate. Quindlen establishes suspense from the first sentence and never falters. She cogently explores the complex emotional atmosphere of abuse: why some women cling to the memory of their original love and wait too long to break free. She makes palpable Frannie's fear, pain, self-contempt and, later, guilt over depriving Robert of the father he adores. As Frannie and Robert make tentative steps in their new community, Quindlen conveys their sense of dislocation and anxiety compounded by their sense of loss. Weaving the domestic fabric that is her forte, she flawlessly reproduces the mundane dialogue between mother and son, between Frannie and the friends she makes and the people she serves in her new job as a home health-care aide. Among the triumphs of Quindlen's superb ear for voices is the character of an elderly Jewish woman whose moribund husband is Frannie's patient. Above all, Quindlen is wise and humane. Her understanding of the complex anatomy of marital relationships, of the often painful bond of maternal love and of the capacity to survive tragedy and carry on invest this moving novel with the clarion ring of truth.

Library Journal