by Mark Lamprell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2016
Arrivederci, Roma. The wise reader will stick with Fodor’s next time.
All roads lead to Rome for three dizzy duos in this meditation on the nature of love.
An aggregation of confused visitors careens around Rome in a second novel by Babe: Pig in the City co-screenwriter Lamprell (The Full Ridiculous, 2014). Alice, a 19-year-old New Yorker, has stopped over in the Eternal City on her way to meet her lackluster fiance but instead falls in lust with August, a British student on a Motorino scooter. Alec and Meg, a warring married couple from Los Angeles, are at each others’ throats from the moment they arrive at the Rome airport. At Meg’s behest, the well-heeled spouses have flown to Rome for the day on “a mission” to find a specific tile with magical qualities for their home. (Metaphor alert!) Constance, a septuagenarian Londoner, has brought her recently departed husband, Henry, to the city with her, lugging his ashes in a Harrods bag. Accompanied by Lizzie, her forbearing sister-in-law, Constance intends to throw Henry’s remains off the Ponte Sant’Angelo bridge as Henry requested. The tourists run around Rome in concentric circles, making muddled messes of their lives. But the travelers are not to be pitied; rather, the author uses the lightly sketched characters as vehicles for bons mots. Although the narrator describes himself as the spirit of Rome itself, a “genius loci,” in truth the storytelling ping pongs crazily from one character’s perspective to the next. The most successfully drawn people are Alec and Meg; Lamprell has perfect pitch when it comes to marital discord. (“It occurred to Alec that he could kill her, dispose of her body, and be back in California before anyone had even noticed she was missing.”) But by the end, this guidebook reads like it has gone through a Cuisinart, leaving a choppy, chaotic mess.
Arrivederci, Roma. The wise reader will stick with Fodor’s next time.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10555-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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...
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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