Drake overplays the mood of sexual menace but is masterful at showing her characters’ sorrows percolate up even through the...
British-born Drake makes her fiction debut with a novel narrated by an adolescent Parisian boy losing whatever innocence (not much) his childhood has allowed him.
To Paul, Paris’ wealthy sixth arrondisement near the Jardin du Luxumbourg is neither charming nor picturesque but “gray” and lonely. His high-achieving parents, Séverine and Philippe, moved to the bourgeois neighborhood only to be near a posh elementary school that ended up rejecting Paul. Overweight and poor at math, aware that he's always disappointed his parents, Paul finds himself on the cusp of adolescence and deeply unhappy. Having divorced a couple of years ago when Paul was 11, Séverine has just given birth to baby Lou with her rock-and-roll boyfriend, Gabriel, while Philippe lives in a St. Germaine bachelor pad and cares primarily about working out and his new Porsche. The only adult who pays attention to Paul is the maid, Cindy, who provides the comfort food he craves. Paul begins an unlikely friendship with a new girl in his class, bonding over their shared sense of being failures in their parents’ eyes. Scarlett is as unhappy as Paul and definitely as complex; strutting sexy rebel vibes but devoted to her dog and entranced by Lou, Scarlett previously attended a strict Catholic school until she was expelled. While their relationship remains platonic even after Scarlett and her boyfriend break up, Paul is thoroughly besotted. At the same time he keeps his eye on the machinations of the adults around him. He watches his snobby paternal grandparents make clear that Philippe can never measure up to his older, even more successful brother. He watches irresponsible Gabriel live off Séverine and Séverine’s desperate struggle against getting old. But then he inadvertently witnesses several deeply disturbing acts that will not surprise the reader but for which Paul is emotionally unprepared and which leave him feeling betrayed and more isolated than ever.
Drake overplays the mood of sexual menace but is masterful at showing her characters’ sorrows percolate up even through the novel’s most cynical moments.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55320-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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