Cummins (stories: Red Ant House, 2003) avoids distracting polemics, interweaving the personal and political with quiet...
The title refers to the noxious dust produced by a uranium mill in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, where this complex, unusually mature debut novel takes place.
In 1991, years after the mill’s closing, former workers and their families still suffer from the fumes’ toxic effects. Ryland Mahoney, a former mill supervisor now dependent on his oxygen tank, refuses to connect his early poor health to his mill work. Although his wife Rosy attends meetings, he wants nothing to do with a group forming to sue for compensation. One member of that group is Becky Atcitty, a loan officer at the local bank, whose father, Woody, worked with Ryland and is now, at 46, dying of cancer. The Mahoneys are Irish Catholic, the Atcittys Navajo. They live in largely separate worlds that sometimes intersect and occasionally collide. Ryland’s best friend, Sam, another mill worker, left Rosy’s sister Lily for Woody’s sister Alice. Sixteen at the time, Alice bore Sam’s child—Delmar—but would not marry him. Now living in Florida and nearly destitute, Sam comes home to attend Ryland’s daughter’s wedding. Discovering that Lily never finalized their divorce, Sam “extorts” money from her. Sam desperately wants to see Alice, who is away on the rodeo circuit. Instead, he tries to reestablish his paternal connection with Delmar for the first time in years. After a short prison stint, Delmar is genuinely, touchingly trying to go straight. Woody soon dies, and Sam helps Delmar and his grandmother try, unsuccessfully, to ensure that he receives a proper Navajo funeral. Becky, who has begun a tentative romance with a Navajo teacher, finds herself caught between loyalty to her father’s Navajo traditions and her mother’s more assimilated Christianity. While Ryland, Sam and Woody have allowed themselves to become victims, Becky and Delmar ultimately learn how to control their own destinies.
Cummins (stories: Red Ant House, 2003) avoids distracting polemics, interweaving the personal and political with quiet authority.Pub Date: March 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-26926-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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