Endearing characters carry a sinuous story of family bonds.
A panoramic novel tracing generations of the Gannon family illuminates the aftershocks of war in the 20th century.
When Michael Gannon, war hero and devout Catholic, husband to Barbara, father to Mike Jr., Luke, Francis, Patty Ann, and soon-to-be Sissy, dies on the front lawn of their yellow house in California, Barbara must learn to manage their lives without him. Predominately following Barbara and Francis, the novel ranges from 1962 to 2015; chapters sometimes jump months, other times decades, to offer snapshots of the family’s progression. Barbara is remarried to Ronnie, a kind and loving but sexually evasive man. To save him from the draft, Patty Ann marries her high school boyfriend, a ne’er-do-well drug dealer, who leaves her with three children. When the situation becomes overwhelming, Barbara and Ronnie become legal guardians to Kennedy, Patty Ann’s eldest son, and care for him even after her third marriage reinstates some stability. After the horrors of losing his father and then his lifelong best friend, Eugene, who killed himself, Francis is relentlessly on the run. But a transformative experience on a boat halfway between Ireland and Scotland leads him to write a hit song and retire, with his fragile wife, to a maple syrup farm in the hills between Massachusetts and Vermont. Characters are occasionally lost in the expanse—Patty Ann’s other children are merely mentioned; we learn in passing that after a military stint, Mike Jr. ends up a doctor in Texas; Sissy has disappeared to Africa. Most important to Korkeakivi (An Unexpected Guest, 2012), it seems, is to communicate the damage war causes, not just physically and not just to soldiers, but emotionally and to families and communities everywhere. This damage underpins the novel; Luke is killed training for Vietnam, and the men who do return from battle do so with injuries that ultimately kill them—Michael’s weakened heart, Eugene’s psychological trauma. Everything works out a little too beautifully—despite the war-induced deaths—tipping the novel somewhat toward the maudlin, its moral toward platitudinous: “The thing about life is it is so damned confusing. Such a web, each piece of it dependent on something else, something that can be as tiny as a smile from a stranger or as huge as heart disease. The good all tangled up with the bad.” Even so, the effortless prose and vining plot make for a winsome tale of kinship and growth.
Endearing characters carry a sinuous story of family bonds.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-30784-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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