by Amy Hatvany ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 2012
Readers who prefer fiction that provides much simpler resolutions than life ever does will like Hatvany’s once-over-lightly...
When her severely disabled sister becomes pregnant, Nicole Hunter must confront the family issues she fled 10 years earlier.
Hatvany’s latest (Outside the Lines, 2012, etc.) afflicts her heroine with multiple traumas. First, there’s the unnamed condition that since infancy has rendered Nicole’s younger sister Jenny physically helpless and mute—except for the terrible screaming fits that provoked their father to hit her. His violence was Trauma Number Two; Number Three was the post-violence trips to Jenny’s bedroom at night, which led Nicole to believe their father sexually abused her. Trauma Number Four was the decision to institutionalize Jenny, which prompted Nicole to leave home 10 years earlier; she blames her mother for giving in to her father’s pressure, especially since the marriage ultimately failed anyway. Now, as the novel opens, comes Trauma Number Five: Jenny has been raped by a Wellman Institute employee, and her mother (Jenny’s legal guardian) refuses to consider terminating the pregnancy. Mom is racked with guilt about an abortion she had years earlier, but Nicole’s poorly motivated willingness to go along with this is one of the many moments when plot gears can be heard clanking loudly. We know from the get-go that Nicole has never really settled into life in San Francisco and that the gorgeous workaholic lawyer she lives with doesn’t want to have kids. So when she starts thinking about adopting Jenny’s baby and her hometown best friend introduces her to an exemplary single dad whose young daughter makes an instinctive connection with Jenny, a degree in rocket science isn’t required to see where all this is heading. Hatvany has an easy, readable prose style, and her tender portrait of Nicole’s nonverbal bond with Jenny (the eponymous language of sisters) is touching. But her characters are painted in broad strokes, and even the most wrenching questions get feel-good answers.
Readers who prefer fiction that provides much simpler resolutions than life ever does will like Hatvany’s once-over-lightly approach just fine.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8813-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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
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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