A challenging and important story about the difficulties of living with mental illness.
In this contemporary novel, a mother’s irrational fear that she might hurt her newborn baby leads to her abandoning the child.
White (Echoes of Family, 2016, etc.) opens her tale as Katelyn MacDonald sits in her daughter’s nursery, suffering severe panic. Struggling with postpartum OCD, Katelyn sees one violent image after another in her mind. Although her daughter, Maisie, is crying in her crib, Katelyn cowers on the floor, afraid to pick her up for fear that she might hurt the child. When her husband, Callum, returns home, Katelyn confesses her worries and begs for help. Unfortunately, he misinterprets the pleas as threats, taking Maisie and barring Katelyn from their bedroom. The narrative then jumps a decade into the future; Callum has become Maisie’s primary caretaker, and Katelyn has not been a part of her daughter’s upbringing. After several difficult years, Katelyn has relocated to Durham, North Carolina, and taken up sculpting as a means of confronting and channeling her anxiety. When her art brings her to a docent program in Raleigh, where she lived with Callum and her daughter, she soon runs into Maisie, a talented student. Maisie believes her mother is dead, and Katelyn does not reveal her identity. As Katelyn, who now goes by Katie Mack, gets to know Maisie through the docent program, she begins to suspect that her daughter has inherited OCD. Rather than leaving town, Katie decides it is time for her to step up and prevent OCD from ruining her daughter’s life the way it did her own. Throughout the absorbing novel, White skillfully shows both Maisie and Katie dealing with destructive and irrational fears (“An old image pounced. One she hadn’t seen in a while. Her hands picking up Maisie…and throwing her down the stairs. The images of harming Maisie had long vanished because Maisie was no longer part of her life. But what if they were back in the same city?”). By taking readers inside the minds of several characters, the author paints a clear and unforgiving picture of mental illness and its ramifications. Although the narrative grows increasingly convoluted as the book progresses, the story feels realistic and relevant. In accessible and engrossing prose, this sentimental tale also explores the struggles inherent in parenting, coupling, and maintaining meaningful relationships.
A challenging and important story about the difficulties of living with mental illness.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4898-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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