Me and Emma » (Reprint)

Elizabeth Flock was obsessed with the news. As a correspondent for CBS News she traveled the world to feed her hunger for the big story of the day. The handover of Hong Kong from British rule back to China, the historic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, and London's reaction to the death and funeral of Princess Diana—Flock covered them all. In between were plane crashes, race riots, floods and famine. Few knew that while she was jetting from one breaking news story to another she was battling clinical depression.

Network correspondents will be the first to tell of the personal sacrifice that's made to follow the story, to beat the competition. Marriages crumble, children grow estranged, friendships wither. Few, though, talk about the inward struggle to stay sane in the middle of chaos. Elizabeth's book But Inside I'm Screaming takes the reader into a fictionalized fight for sanity.

Soon after returning from living abroad in London, Elizabeth landed in San Francisco, reporting for both Time and People magazines. While she was at Time her work included several cover stories, one investigating Chinese gang activity, another on the current movement toward the preservation of marriage, a third on the fiery siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. For People she covered many Bay Area stories, including the Ellie Nesler story of a mother who shot and killed the man suspected of molesting her son. After five years of print reporting, Elizabeth was drawn to television. Soon she was anchoring and reporting at a 24-hour cable network based in San Francisco and writing for the NBC affiliatenewsstation.

But New York beckoned, and after a freelance stint covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 for CBS, she was hired, handed a beeper and cell phone and began working on the ulcer that would ultimately slow her down and change her life.

By 1998 Elizabeth knew she could no longer make the sacrifice required of a rising network star and instead chose the peaceful life of writing.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Elizabeth is married, has two stepdaughters, four cats and a dog and lives in Chicago. She is currently working on her next novel.

In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old—playing make-believe, dreading school, dreaming of faraway places.

But even her imagination can't shut out the realities of her impoverished North Carolina home or help her protect her younger sister, Emma.

As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather, Richard—abuse their momma can't seem to see, let alone stop.

But after the sisters' plan to run away from home unravels, their world takes a shocking turn—and one shattering moment ultimately reveals a truth that leaves everyone reeling.

Publishers Weekly

"I got handed lemons, too, y'know-but I learned how to make lemonade with them.... No one ever told me I had to add sugar but that's life for you. It ain't sweet." That's the jumbled and unforgiving logic that drives Flock's (But Inside I'm Screaming) second novel, a punishing Southern family drama that tries to achieve To Kill a Mockingbird-grade poignancy by heaping tribulations on its child narrator. The novel starts off sweetly, with the smalltown antics of Carrie, a scrappy Scout-like eight-year-old who's always accompanied by her younger sister Emma. Carrie dreamily darts back and forth between her rough-and-tumble present (abusive stepfather, unloving mother) and the happy memories of her dead father, creating a bittersweet picture of her life in Toast, N.C., spiked with colorful Southern language and some feisty supporting characters. But journalist Flock soon loses control of her meandering story and this Southern slice-of-life disintegrates into narrative chaos. The action moves "slow as a crippled turtle," as Carrie's Momma would say, and down-home charm fails to camouflage the creaky, roundabout chronology. After nearly 300 pages of rambling drama, the twist at the end is revealed so haphazardly that it will probably bewilder readers more than surprise them. Sugarcoated it ain't, but instead of delivering profundity, Flock's tough love turns poor forsaken Carrie into a caricature. Agent, Laura Dail. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.