Ray treads the fine line between coincidence and contrivance with bravado and finesse.
This sprawling novel gives new, multilayered meaning to that old cliché, “It's a small world.”
Ray’s American debut is all about connections—and disconnections. As the title suggests, the concept of geographical displacement is a major motif. In 1989, shortly after Thanksgiving, an Indian-American couple, the Mitras, are found dead in their upstate New York home, murdered by an intruder. So far, the only suspect is their adult daughter, Devika. From there, the novel’s passage across time and space begins, landing first in 1840s Ireland. In the seaside village of Mullaghmore, budding Irish rebel Padraig; his mother, Maire; his best friend, Brendan; his true love, Brigid; and his teacher Mr. O’Flaherty pursue their passions, never dreaming their world is about to be upended. Padraig, through a set of circumstances which in less adept authorial hands would be nothing short of nonsensical, finds himself aboard an East India Company trading ship. While Padraig prospers in India, Maire and Brigid perish in the potato famine; Maeve, Padraig’s and Brigid’s small daughter, is taken by Brendan aboard a famine ship, which is shipwrecked off the coast of Canada. Thanks to a friendly hog, survivors Maeve and Brendan secure a home on a Vermont farm. Later, Maeve’s daughter, Bibi, is killed in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, and her toddler son, lost in the confusion following the fire, will be raised as an orphan, never knowing his family of origin. Meanwhile, in India, Padraig's Irish-Indian grandson, Robert Aherne, and descendants of the Mitra family, Padraig’s saviors and mentors in India, tell their intersecting tales. The scene shifts back to the United States, where drug dealer Billy, whose abusive father is Bibi’s lost son, encounters Devika. The variegated colors, tastes and textures of Ray’s narrative, as it moves through multiple points of view, lend a powerful sense of context to both the most trivial and the most tragic of human circumstances.
Ray treads the fine line between coincidence and contrivance with bravado and finesse.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3599-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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