Tenderness

I thought this book was great. You got both Eric and Lori's viewpoint. I thought it was well written and I read it in an hour and a half. I couldn't put it down. The ending was quite a surprise but I still loved it. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Robert Cormier.

Tenderness by Robert Cormier is a story about a girl named Lori who gets these "fixations" on people and the only way they can be broken is if she kisses them. Her first fixation is a rockstar that goes my the name Throb. She goes to her old town to see Throb so she can finally end her fixation. After she ends that fixation she find herself into another one with Eric Poole an 18 year old boy who has just be let out of a correctional home for the murder of his parents. So now Lori is fixated on a Murderer. In the book Lori and Eric meet. Lori relizes shes not fixated on Eric shes in love with him, but Eric is searching for Tenderness. Lori recieves tenderness when she ends her fixations and knows that Eric holds the kind of tenderness she wants. I think this book is a great book it shows the different points of view from the main charecters and uses imagery. You would like this book if you were into twisted love stories. I one things about the book that I didnt like was how it ended other wise it was great.

The title of my book is Tenderness. Robert Cormier is the author. He has also written: Heros, The Chocolate War, We All Fall Down, and more. Lori Cranston is a teenager with blonde hair and a nice mature body (though she is only 15.) She only has a mother because her father had died along time ago. Her mother was always beautiful, and goes through lots of men, not her choice though...she just isn't good a picking out the "good type of guys." Most boyfriends of her mother like Lori also. Lori's mother is a waitress, and she is very experienced. They move around alot because of this, her mom likes to move up to higher qualitiy resturants. Loriel had "fixations." She ins't a stalker or physco or a rapest, but she gets moments when she wanted to be tender with someone. Like the guy ad Aud-Vid land, she lets him look at her so that she gets free CD's from him since he works there. Or how about the guy she met on the thru-way, she let him make-out with her and touch her so she could get twenty dollars. But then her mothers boyfriend Gary, the first guy that actually treats her mother right since her husband trys to lay the moves on Loriel. She decideds she needs to get out, so she doesn't hurt her mom. She leaves a note saying that she is staying with her friends in her old town, her mom thinks she does this alot...even though Lori makes up peoples names everytime she leaves. Now Lori is fixated on her favorite singer, Throb. All she wants is to kiss him, so she goes to Wickburg (her old town) and finds out that she can meet Throb. (But of course Throb does not know.) She waits outside in an alley-way where Throb will go to avoid the crowds of teenage girls. As the door opens she runs out and kisses Throb hard on the lips. At that moment, her fixation is oer. Those kind of things she gets, melt like ice. Her moral is, to do it and get it over with. (A moral is something like a motive, a reason for something that you do.) She now is in a diner in Wickburg and something catches her eye. On the news it is talking about a guy that is getting out of jail for murder. (He killed his mother and his step-dad.) She then has a flash-back. (This is when something that once happend before pops into your head and you remember it.) She remembers his familar face, those eyes. Then she figures it out. She saw him along time ago when she used to live in Wickburg at the train tracks. She saw him with a girl and they went into the woods, but then she saw him again awhile later and he wasn't with her anymore, but she didn't think anything of it. She had a slight coversation with him. After Eric gets out of jail (or the facility he was in) he moves in with his aunt. Lori goes through alot to stay in Wickburg...because she now has to be tender with Eric, and Eric gets these moments also. He just wants to be tender with someone, like Lori. One night Lori sneaks into his van to sleep and when she wakes up he is in the van pulling out of the drive-way. She is now trapped, so

Upon reading tenderness, I was intrigued by how real the book was. Lori's behavior showed just how a sexually abused teenager might act, instead of the hysterical actions of many abused fiction characters. I loved reading this and many Robert Cormier books because they seem to unlock the human mind. While reading about Eric Poole, I couldn't help but think if this is what really goes on inside the mind of a serial killer. It is the only way to describe him, and the way that Lori and Eric's stories were brought together in the end truly got to me. After reading this, Robert Cormier has been my favorite author of all time, and I, at the age of fifteen, am still setting out to read every single one.