Social satire with a sharp wit and a big heart.
A rich, rewarding tale of love, rebirth, and chewing tobacco from the author of Mislaid (2015) and The Wallcreeper (2014).
When we first meet Penny, she’s 12, naked, and smoking a cigarette in her father’s sweat lodge in upstate New York. Eleven years later, she’s an unemployed business school graduate sitting in her dying father’s New Jersey hospital room. This loss devastates Penny in all the usual ways, and Zink’s depictions of grief and—especially—the strange state of waiting for someone to die are honest and real and occasionally lovely. In one especially heartbreaking scene, Penny realizes that, the closer he gets to death, the less she and Norm have in common. But then: “The strength and courage they desire—and lack, both of them—are the strength and courage never to see each other again. Fear is something they have in common.” This level of self-awareness is one of Penny’s finest qualities as a protagonist. The daughter of a Jewish shamanistic healer and an indigenous Colombian orphan, Penny knows she’s unusual. But she also accepts that being unusual isn’t all that strange, which is why she finds a new family when she sets out to reclaim her father’s ancestral home in Jersey City. Thrown together by the marginalization of tobacco users, the residents of Nicotine—the squat occupying the house where Norm grew up—are outré outsiders even in the outsider realm of activists and agitators. Penny is immediately smitten with the very cute and avowedly asexual Rob. When Penny’s sociopathic half brother, Matt, becomes obsessed with another occupant—a polyamorous Kurdish poet named Jazz—they form an untenable tangle of relationships that can only end in destruction. The resulting disaster is spellbinding, but even the quiet moments here are delightful because Zink does such an incredible job of depicting weirdos as real, smart, vulnerable, complicated people.
Social satire with a sharp wit and a big heart.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9780062441706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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