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All People's Lives Matter

Name: All People's Lives Matter
Author: Billy McCoy

by Billy McCoy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2016

An ambitious and topical effort about a young activist, but it’s melodramatic and erratically structured.

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An idealist wrestles with the austere realities of life beyond the safe confines of her college campus.

Holly Lundgren, a junior biology major at the University of Minnesota, hails from a long-standing family tradition of activism in the pursuit of social justice. She’s inspired to volunteer for an increasingly powerful organization, All People’s Lives Matter, but is disillusioned by the questionable character of one of the movement’s leaders. Holly intends to marry her boyfriend, despite her general lack of enthusiasm and his infidelity, but then abandons those plans when she meet’s a similarly idealistic law student, Brandon Olsen, whom she marries quickly in the face of her mother’s vociferous objections. Brandon is badly injured in a car accident and turns to booze as a salve for his chronic pain because he can’t afford prescription medication. Holly becomes pregnant and is compelled to take a job cleaning a hotel, work both backbreaking and demoralizing for a former academic star. Holly is able to briefly pull them out of financial dire straits by selling her design for a more supportive flip-flop, but that venture eventually flounders, and she’s forced to leave Brandon and move back in with her mother, Vera. Then Vera reveals some startling family secrets and tells her about a decades-old mystery. McCoy (Plums for the Flawed Soul: A Guide to Peace, Serenity, and Forgiveness, 2016, etc.) seems intent on unpacking the psychological dynamic that fuels youthful idealism, but both the plot and the characters are so messily drawn it’s never entirely clear what point is ultimately being made. Holly, shrill and emotionally unstable, appears utterly incapable of even the simplest long-term decision-making, driven by whim rather than ideology. Her character is 20 years old but seems considerably younger given her ostentatiously arrested development. And the plot is a pastiche of dramatic crescendos largely disconnected from each other, a series of narrative spikes without any intermittent valleys. The author has a flair for soap-operatic twists and turns, but there doesn’t seem to be a main story for such twists to diverge from. This is a short book—more a novella than a novel—but it’s still unlikely to keep most reads engaged to the end.

An ambitious and topical effort about a young activist, but it’s melodramatic and erratically structured.

Pub Date: April 21, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 267

Publisher: Janus Media

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2016

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.