by Alan Rossman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 13, 2019
A perceptive novel about human connection that sometimes gets lost in its own thoughts.
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A grieving graphic designer forms a unique bond with a depressed neighbor in Rossman’s debut novel.
It’s been a year and a half since Owen and Janey Conway’s son, Aaron, died. To deal with his grief, Owen has been attending a support group called SOS. He’s also interested in a neighbor named Wilson Lacy, a retired scientist and teacher. Owen barely knows him, but he’s seen him tooling around the neighborhood in his 1950s sports car. Because Owen is sad, he’s drawn to what he senses is Wilson’s sadness, so he approaches his neighbor with a proposal. Owen’s a graphic designer, and he wonders if Wilson might want to take part in a project involving seven photographs, carefully chosen to represent significant points in the neighbor’s lifetime. Wilson, whose wife has recently left him due to his depression, agrees to the plan. “Maybe he was beginning to see something else in his photographs that could be used to shed some light on his darkness—and that glimmer moved him with an amalgam of desperation and hope,” narrates Owen. His plan involves what he calls “visual literacy” (“The idea is that there is meaning engraved in all visual images”), and he presents the project to Wilson as a kind of science experiment. Then Sophie, the hostess at the local pub, enters the picture; Owen introduces her to Wilson without fully realizing the effect that she might have. Rossman’s novel about grief and its aftermath is truly heartfelt in its execution. Over the course of the story, the author clearly describes his protagonist’s complicated thought processes as he wades through grief on the way to acceptance. The characters are all thoughtful people who are clearly interested in finding answers to hard questions, and Rossman elegantly expresses Owen’s efforts to connect with a possibly kindred soul. The novel is long-winded, however, and the dense prose can make some of the book’s loftier concepts a bit hard to grasp. An extensive epilogue with photographs provides helpful insights, but other parts of the story remain hazy.
A perceptive novel about human connection that sometimes gets lost in its own thoughts.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6531-6
Page Count: 354
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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