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THE LOST SON

Name: THE LOST SON
Author: Brent Spencer
ISBN: 1-55970-266-4

by Brent Spencer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1995

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Spencer achieves what most debut writers merely attempt: He gives personal experience universal meaning and makes small-town tragedy profound. Sharp insight and sensitive prose distinguish what might have been a familiar tale of a dysfunctional family. The author gives his version additional interest by employing the perspectives of three different people: the jilted boyfriend, the abandoned son, and the girlfriend/mother who can't take it anymore. Each voice is distinct and unique; all three impress and convince. As the novel opens, it has been six months since Ellen ran out on Redmond, leaving her 16-year-old son, Nick, in his care. Gradually, as Redmond and Nick work on their farm in northeastern Pennsylvania, we learn more about the older man's stormy 12-year relationship with Ellen. They met during one of her habitual nights out at the local bar. Attracted to needy, vulnerable women, he wanted more than a one-night stand, despite discovering four-year-old Nick in her trailer-home bathtub. But Redmond often became violent and sometimes disappeared for months at a time, though he always came back. After Ellen herself finally leaves, Nick blames Redmond, and their interactions become increasingly antagonistic: The boy electrocutes Redmond while they're repairing the pasture fence; he retaliates by trapping Nick in the chicken coop. A lot happens as a prelude to the trio's ultimate confrontation. During her bus journey home Ellen realizes she must reclaim her son and confront her lover in order to take back her life (Spencer deserves applause here for capturing women so well). Redmond sorts though memories of childhood abuse and confronts his nemesis when the father he hasn't seen in years comes to town. And Nick survives the pain of loneliness and isolation by emotionally manipulating Redmond, hoping his life will change, and falling in love. Tender, skillful, and true.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-55970-266-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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FAMILY TREE

by Susan Wiggs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.

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After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.

As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-242543-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.