Joan Leslie Woodruff

GHOST in the RAINBOW Joan Leslie Woodruff

GHOST...is a powerfully effecting book. It is both metaphysical and yet intensely physical. By focusing on the tenuous border between madness and what we take for sanity, Joan Leslie Woodruff strips away the layers of the mind of a psychotic, a murderer who soon becomes fixated on the author's protagonist, Myra Whitehawk. Whitehawk herself is wrestling with her own form of madness as we meet her, recently separated from a cold-fish of a husband and slipping in and out of acute alcohol dependency. With a voice that remains authentic from start to finish, Ms. Woodruff explores that hidden territory which lies between delusion and reality, life and death, conscienceless cruelty and sacrificial compassion. With a wisdom that can only come from deep personal experience she leads the reader into those vulnerable places within the human and animal psyche in which we are shown how our very humanity, our compassion and caring, emerge from the deep flaws in our characters which we are trying sometimes hopelessly to master. Contrasted with this is the cool, cruel, acutely intelligent, but ultimately machinelike mind of the psychotic.