A comic novel about parenting infused with emotional intelligence.
The parents of an eccentric adopted child head west to explore his roots and learn a few things about their own.
Maya and Alex are immigrants of Russian Jewish extraction with little comprehension of America outside their suburban New Jersey enclave, so they’re not sure what to make of it when their preteen son, Max, acquires a taste for the outdoors. He scares mom and dad by briefly disappearing to explore a nearby stream, has a newfound expertise in varieties of grasses, and he’s gotten frighteningly close to the fauna in the backyard. Perhaps his biological parents’ native land, Montana, somehow lurks in his genes? It’s a preposterous notion, but for a novelist with a sense of the absurd like Fishman (A Replacement Life, 2014, etc.), it’s enough to hang a novel on, and he has plenty of insights on how blurrily parents often perceive the nature-versus-nurture divide. Eager to look for the roots of Max’s behavior, Maya thinks back to her own past (as an aspiring restaurateur who married to stay in the United States) as well as her scraps of memory of Max’s biological parents, a hotel-clerk mom and battered rodeo-performer dad (hence the title). Fishman entertainingly satirizes a host of types (a folk healer, a dotty psychologist, a weary adoption-agency staffer, starchy old-world in-laws), but he’s sincere when it comes to Maya, who’s at the center of a plot twist that gives the closing chapters their gravitas. This feels almost like a magic trick given some of the narrative creakiness: Fishman sometimes overwrites scenes, Max and Alex don’t claim much of the stage, a love-story detour feels untenable, and Montana is overplayed as a punch line. (“It can’t be more beautiful than New Jersey,” says Maya.) But Fishman smartly observes that the assimilation novel and road-trip novel make good partners. Both, after all, are about finding freedom.
A comic novel about parenting infused with emotional intelligence.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-238436-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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