Richly drawn characters behaving in unexpected ways make Meek’s (We are Now Beginning our Descent, 2008, etc.) latest a gem.
Scientists may have some luck in explaining how our bodies function and malfunction, but who can tell the ways of the heart?
Some 25 years ago, Capt. Greg Shepherd was captured and shot by Northern Irish guerrillas. His death has infected his children’s hearts like a parasite, leading them into the bleaker frontiers of love. Ritchie Shepherd, an aging rock star, has a good family: a wife, Karin, and two children. Yet Ritchie’s moral compass is contaminated, as his affair with a 15-year-old girl testifies. Ritchie’s sister, Bec, is a researcher in Tanzania, who finds her blood colonized by a new parasite, which may hold the key to a malaria vaccine, and which she names after her father. Her rather accidental fiance, Val, is a powerful yet emotionally unbalanced newspaper editor. Realizing that she does not love Val, Bec tries to right the moral ship by returning her engagement ring, but she unwittingly sets in motion a course of betrayal. Val offers Ritchie a devil’s bargain: He can keep his pedophiliac secret if he exposes something just as damaging about Bec. Struggling to find his way out of the moral swamp, Ritchie delves into the past. He begins a documentary on Colum Donobhan, the man who shot his father, a man who may be harboring more secrets about Capt. Shepherd’s death. Grieving that her vaccine for malaria is a failure, Bec returns to London and finds Alex, who has secretly loved her for years. A brilliant cancer researcher, Alex has his own troubles, including his Uncle Harry’s cancer diagnosis. He and Harry have made careers out of explaining how cancer cells behave, but neither of them can predict the consequences of following one's heart.
Richly drawn characters behaving in unexpected ways make Meek’s (We are Now Beginning our Descent, 2008, etc.) latest a gem.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-16871-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
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
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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