A coming-of-age story with an admirably complex setup that leads to disappointing conclusions.
A young boy faces the consequences of intolerance and toxic masculinity after falling in with the wrong crowd in Hunter’s debut YA novel.
Fifth-grader Noah Henderson comes home one day to have his mom introduce him to Brett, his “new father,” whom she says he should call “Dad” from now on. Very soon afterward, Noah is uprooted from Palm Springs, California, and dropped into the rigid, conservative world of Utah Valley, Utah. His life suddenly includes harsh spankings from Brett, four hours a day reading the Book of Mormon, and constant pressure from his mother to help mold an image of a perfect family in church. However, three young boys in his Sunday school class—Nick, Chase, and Andrew—see to it that Noah will never be a “perfect” Mormon child. Noah begins to adopt their rough mannerisms, hurling rocks at cars and tormenting those they see as effeminate boys in his class. Nick’s transgendered sister soon introduces the boys to pornography, and the kids’ rough interactions quickly turn to brutal sexual abuse. Soon, Noah is a traumatized rape survivor, desperately trying to hide from the cruelty of other children in any way he can. He quickly learns that the price for trying yet again to fit into such a hostile world can be devastating. At first, it seems inevitable that that novel will follow Noah as he grapples with his own homosexual feelings, but then the story takes a surprising turn; in its second act, he becomes both a helpless victim and a perpetrator of bigotry, and Hunter handles Noah’s tortured thoughts well. However, the book stumbles in the final chapters, failing to create a satisfying conclusion to the fascinating paradox at the center of the story. Noah never embraces himself as an outsider nor rallies with other victims, as in Stephen Chbosky’s similarly dark 1999 high school drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Instead, Noah’s isolation and obsession with his tormentors persists until the very last page. The book, unfortunately, makes the very same mistake that Noah does, by giving too much power to his bullies.
A coming-of-age story with an admirably complex setup that leads to disappointing conclusions.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 203
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 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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