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SOWN IN TEARS

Name: SOWN IN TEARS
Author: Beverly Magid
ISBN: Magid

by Beverly Magid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2012

An intricately plotted piece of period fiction that doesn’t quite separate itself from similar efforts.

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Following the murder of her husband, a Jewish woman in 1905 Russia struggles to provide a future for her children amid revolution and poverty.

Besieged by pillaging soldiers and townspeople, Leah Peretz’s husband, Morris, is killed defending his family. Without other options, and with an 8-year-old and an infant at home, Leah takes a job working as a cook for the very regiment that attacked her family. There, she meets the sympathetic Capt. Vaselik, who not only provides her employment despite the objections of his soldiers but also takes a romantic interest in her as well. At home, Leah finds herself becoming enmeshed—reluctantly at first—in the rebellion taking place among her fellow Jews. Prompted by the young revolutionary Yaakov, Leah begins to attend meetings, harbor dissidents and share pamphlets objecting to Russia’s treatment of its Jewish population. Overall, it’s a wonderfully plotted novel that would work better if the author were a more thoroughgoing storyteller. Too often Magid relies on cliché where fresher descriptions would make Leah’s story come alive: Characters rue the day, eyes get misty, and tears stain letters, all of which tends to dampen the story’s momentum. Worse, though, is that in the novel’s conclusion, the complicated plot topples under its own weight. When Vaselik is reassigned to a new post after cancelling a warrant for Yaakov’s arrest, the romance that Magid has done the work of establishing simply fizzles without anything resembling a payoff. And since Leah is so often painted as the victim, her revenge against her husband’s killer at the end of the book is so far afield from how readers understand her that it reads as simply unbelievable. The relationships between the characters are complex, particularly the unlikely romance between Vaselik and Leah, but since the narrative so often stays in exposition, it struggles to memorably capture that complexity.

An intricately plotted piece of period fiction that doesn’t quite separate itself from similar efforts.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2012

ISBN: Magid

Page Count: 194

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

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...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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.

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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.