A heartwarming meditation on the transformative power of kindness and women’s friendship.
A woman on the run from her controlling, manipulative, and—yes, she’s ready to admit it—physically abusive husband. A 14-year-old girl reeling from her mother’s sudden death. Can they help each other find peace?
Finally ready to divorce Robert, Faith seeks refuge at her parents’ California beach house, a sanctuary that, until now, has always been rented out, so Robert has never known its location. But one morning she discovers Sarah, a teenage girl, sitting on the beach in front of her door. Now living with her grandmother Constance down the shore, Sarah is grieving not only the loss of her mother to a gunshot, but also her father’s sale of her beloved mare, Falkner’s Midnight Sun. Having lost her own mother at age 12, Faith connects easily with Sarah, and the two begin forging fragile ties. Yet Faith’s own shaky confidence is rattled when she notices a man following her car, and she suspects that Robert has hired a private investigator to locate her. However, when the man turns out to be her new neighbor, Greg, Faith must weigh her fears against her hopes to find love again. Meanwhile, to help Constance gain custody of Sarah, Faith agrees to take the girl away, reuniting her with her horse. And as the horse’s new owner seeks a buyer, Sarah prepares to say goodbye to Midnight one more time and face the truth about her mother’s death. Perhaps best known for Pay It Forward, Hyde (Heaven Adjacent, 2018, etc.) has written another novel that's primed for filming. Their spirits bruised, each woman, young and old, struggles to overcome the dominance of men, and Hyde’s talent lies in drawing these women together with bonds of compassion.
A heartwarming meditation on the transformative power of kindness and women’s friendship.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0485-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Some fictional trips into 1970s New York abound with nostalgia; this novel memorably opts for grit and heartbreak.
The protagonist of this coming-of-age novel set in late-1970s New York City falls under the wing of an unlikely mentor: Lou Reed.
The Sopranos actor Imperioli’s first novel begins with a family sundered. Narrator Matthew details the death of his estranged father, his mother’s growing dependence on pills, and an inheritance that prompts the two of them to leave the confines of their Queens neighborhood for an upscale apartment in Manhattan. Among their neighbors is Lou Reed, at a point in his life when he rapidly veered from grandiose to paranoid, from generous to menacing. As Matthew comes to terms with his feelings for his classmate Veronica, he becomes increasingly aware of perspectives other than his own, along with a growing restlessness. Early on, Matthew recalls a dinner with a boorish friend of his that quickly turns violent, as he lashes out after his friend makes a number of grotesque and sexist comments. At the beginning of the next chapter, he pauses and then recants his earlier words: “I’m a liar. A liar and a coward.” Imperioli plays with this kind of narrative tension throughout. The arc of the novel—a young man forming a tense, unpredictable bond with a mercurial mentor—is familiar, but Imperioli’s lived-in details about the city help make the world feel realistic. And while some of the novel’s characters, Veronica in particular, call out for more time on the page, the end result is an immersive trip into its narrator’s memories of a turbulent time.
Some fictional trips into 1970s New York abound with nostalgia; this novel memorably opts for grit and heartbreak.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-620-7
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more...
Four close friends, their husbands, their children, their housecleaners—and one application-only magnet school that will drive them all over the brink.
A Boulder-esque town in the Front Range of the Rockies, Crystal, Colorado, is a progressive paradise where four entwined families are raising their children, though death, divorce, and drugs have taken their toll on the group since the moms met at baby swim class years back. The women give each other mugs with friendship quotes each year on the anniversary of that meeting, and they get together every Friday morning for a 4-mile run, "a ritual carved into the flinty stone of their lives…shared since they'd first started trimming up again after the births of their children." Beneath the surface, resentments are already simmering—one family is far wealthier than the others; the widowed mom is a neurotic mess; one of the couples didn't make it through elementary school and he's remarried to "a hot young au pair who was great with the twins [and] a willing partner in mindblowing carnality." Then comes the announcement of a public magnet school for exceptional learners, with a standardized test as the first step in separating the wheat from the chaff. The novel's depiction of the ensuing devolution is grounded in acute social observation—class, race, privilege, woke and libertarian politics—then hits the mark on the details as well. From the bellowing of the dads on the soccer field to the oversharing in the teenager's vlog, down to the names of the kids themselves—twins Aidan and Charlie Unsworth-Chaudhury; best friends Emma Z and Emma Q; nerdy chessmaster Xander Frye—Holsinger's (The Invention of Fire, 2015) pitch is close to perfect.
The subject of parents charging past every ethical restraint in pursuit of crème de la crème education could not be more timely, and the Big Little Lies treatment creates a deliciously repulsive and eerily current page-turner.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53496-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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