From Publishers Weekly
Winner of TriQuarterly's 1994 William Goyen prize for fiction, this powerful debut novel explores the hidden niches of cruelty, lust, political corruption and misogyny. Narrator Libby Martin, daughter of a state senator, is 15 when she receives an anonymous obscene letter threatening her with rape and mutilation. The missive changes her life and her perceptions of her family and friends. In a course of painful discoveries, she confronts her father's duplicitous adulteries, her mother's frustrated obsessions with order and cleanliness and a friend's betrayal of trust and loyalty. Finally, in a violent and sexually graphic conclusion, she gains a form of empowerment. With perfectly pitched dialogue and a story grounded in details of contemporary manners and mores-from rock music to sexual harassment in the political arena-Lewis's shattering study of sexual violence and individual vulnerability is both timely and universally resonant. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
One fine day, 15-year-old Libby Martin, the daughter of a U.S. senator, receives a threatening anonymous letter. This event unleashes a torrent of jumbled half-memories and sexual fantasies that concludes with a convoluted rape and murder sequence. A victim of yet another dys-functional family with a womanizing father and a bitter mother, Libby is caught up in her own sexual innocence at a time when she is most vulnerable. The winner of the 1994 William Goyen Prize for fiction, this first novel unfortunately suffers from overstylized prose and a weak plot. Most libraries can pass.Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., N.C.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This visceral, unforgettable first novel explores the dark awakening of female sexuality in a violent male atmosphere of politics, familial decay, and studied barbarism. Libby Martin, the 15-year-old daughter of a state senator, receives an anonymous psychopathic letter threatening her with sexual disfigurement. Sharp and articulate, Libby negotiates the labyrinth in her life presented in the form of her father's infidelities and her mother's emotional widowhood, yet she still has interest in courting the embodiment of misogynist terror that is threatening her, who turns out to be a Tantric multimillionaire crazy with politics, the Second Coming, and virgin blood. Lewis is perceptive; her vision is razor sharp in slicing away the counterfeit differences separating victim from abuser here. This is neither a suspense novel nor a horror thriller; it is a brilliantly conceived account of the innocence and complicity with which a young woman enters a world of masculine fanaticism and abuse. Greg Burkman

From Kirkus Reviews
A nicely pointed first novel about a stalker's explicit letters to a teenage girl falls apart when it adopts the muddled plotting, senseless violence, and out-of-character stupid choices of a grade-B horror movie. Libby is a smart, sassy 15-year-old, the daughter of aloof Senator Tom Martin and his gung-ho devout, church-going wife, whom the whole family calls Ma'am. Libby lives in an ordinary American suburb, where she chatters with Dad's colleagues, plays with her sister, and talks to boys on the phone when she grows too old to tie them up in the backyard. Then she receives an anonymous letter threatening heinous sexual violence and murder. All this preliminary material is delivered in a concise, visual style that promises more evocative descriptions in an airtight plot. But these hopes are dashed when Libby is forced to take a road trip with Dad, ostensibly to escape the stalker. In an unconvincing bohemian about-face, the pair tool around in his messy car with some of his young employees (including a political adversary's daughter), eating in greasy spoons and crashing at the house of a colleague: the bathrobed Senator Ada Russell. Improbable events pile one upon the other in dizzying confusion, mingling all the while with Libby's flashbacks, which are excessively preoccupied with breasts, menstrual blood, and vomit. The vile letter is eclipsed by Libby's much more twisted reality. She learns the terrible truth about her father's relationship with Senator Russell and is sexually molested by more than one person. The brutal impact of this graphic abuse is amplified by her sudden inability to make intelligent decisions and by her captors' murky motives. The collapse of a coherent story is at least as upsetting as the novel's gruesome content. Bloodbath. Bilebath. Plan on a shower after this one. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Midwest Book Review
Private Correspondences is a moral thunderclap. This novel portrays a teenage girl who, attacked by violent evil, chooses not to fleet it but to face it, and then embrace it. It explores the effects of male force and brutality on women and the issue of women's complicity in sexual violence. Libby Martin is a state senator's daughter maturing in a world of barely sublimated violence and sexuality - a precocious observer of the routine corruption and comprom-ise of local politics and of their effect on her family and on herself. In prose that swings between lyrical moments of illumination and gritty sexual insight, Lewis explores the dark heart of a misogynist culture. Stark, powerful, impossible to forget, Private Correspondences is a major work by a gifted and thrilling new writer.

ANNOTATION

This stark and powerful first novel--the winner of the 1994 William Goyen Prize for fiction--tells of a teenage girl who, when attacked by sexual violence, chooses not to flee it but to face it, and then to embrace it. Between lyrical moments of illumination and insight, Lewis explores the dark heart of a misogynist culture.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This novel portrays a teenage girl who, attacked by violent evil, chooses not to flee it but to face it, and then to embrace it. It explores the effects of male force and brutality on women and the issue of women's complicity in sexual violence.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Winner of TriQuarterly's 1994 William Goyen prize for fiction, this powerful debut novel explores the hidden niches of cruelty, lust, political corruption and misogyny. Narrator Libby Martin, daughter of a state senator, is 15 when she receives an anonymous obscene letter threatening her with rape and mutilation. The missive changes her life and her perceptions of her family and friends. In a course of painful discoveries, she confronts her father's duplicitous adulteries, her mother's frustrated obsessions with order and cleanliness and a friend's betrayal of trust and loyalty. Finally, in a violent and sexually graphic conclusion, she gains a form of empowerment. With perfectly pitched dialogue and a story grounded in details of contemporary manners and mores-from rock music to sexual harassment in the political arena-Lewis's shattering study of sexual violence and individual vulnerability is both timely and universally resonant. (Sept.)

Library Journal

One fine day, 15-year-old Libby Martin, the daughter of a U.S. senator, receives a threatening anonymous letter. This event unleashes a torrent of jumbled half-memories and sexual fantasies that concludes with a convoluted rape and murder sequence. A victim of yet another dys-functional family with a womanizing father and a bitter mother, Libby is caught up in her own sexual innocence at a time when she is most vulnerable. The winner of the 1994 William Goyen Prize for fiction, this first novel unfortunately suffers from overstylized prose and a weak plot. Most libraries can pass.-Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., N.C.

BookList - Greg Burkman