THEFT

Name: THEFT
Author: BK Loren
ISBN: 978-1-58243-819-1

by BK Loren ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2012

A literary narrative encompassing the bonds of family, the echo of tragedy, as well as love and acceptance, played out...

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In Loren’s debut literary fiction, Zeb Robbins and his sister Willa are products of the wild western mountains, where “not fitting in was the only way to fit in.”

Willa is a wildlife researcher, monitoring Mexican gray wolves in New Mexico’s Días de Ojos National Forest. Zeb, a chronic thief during childhood, drives a truck, but he prefers his cabin, his horses, his hunting bow and the forests of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. The story switches from present day back to the pair's childhood. Nearly raising themselves, Zeb and Willa provide care and support for their mother. Stoic, somewhat bitter over being relegated to a tract house adjoining her family’s farm (seized by eminent domain), the mother is incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease. Their father is on the road much of the time or working more than one job, unaware of Zeb’s thefts, Willa’s complicity and his children’s chronic problems with a neighbor who abuses his wife. Loren switches points of view from Willa to Zeb and sometimes to Brenda, childhood friend and later, Zeb’s lover. Brenda is Native American, adopted into a neighborhood family. Her natural father, Raymond, enters the story and offers another perspective on the reintroduction of the nearly extinct wolf. Zeb’s outlier behavior, “living on an edge sharp enough that it toughened his own skin but left his insides shredded and vulnerable and tired,” is wonderfully drawn, as is the powerful bond between the siblings. For reasons worthy of speculation, Zeb confesses to a long-ago murder, and a Colorado sheriff demands that Willa, a master tracker, trail Zeb into the mountains. The mood and myth and magic of the high country, especially Willa’s life atop an isolated mesa and Zeb’s mountain refuge, will resonate with those who love the American southwest.

A literary narrative encompassing the bonds of family, the echo of tragedy, as well as love and acceptance, played out against a fragile yet enduring natural world.

Pub Date: June 12, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-58243-819-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Counterpoint

Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.