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GLASTON TOWN

Name: GLASTON TOWN
Author: Céline La Frenière
ISBN: 978-1500599485

by Céline La Frenière ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2014

A trio of stories that stand out individually but, like the Glaston Town residents, are much stronger as a whole.

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In La Frenière’s debut thriller, the savage murder of a local citizen threatens a close-knit community in a small London village.

Many of Glaston Town’s residents are low-income families living in social housing. But the citizens find themselves united when a nearby area once populated by criminals is redeveloped, consequently flooding Glaston Town with displaced drug dealers, prostitutes, and other lawbreakers. Members of the community band together to clean up their streets, forming a collective when the park, Lavender Gardens, may be destroyed by a developer to make way for a lorry (truck) route. But the biggest menace the citizens face may be from within: One of the housing tenants is killed from multiple stab wounds, a murder that an ensuing investigation shows was likely committed by someone in Glaston Town. La Frenière’s novel is split into three separate parts, each in a distinctive genre. Part I, “The Solitary Kingfisher,” feels like a drama, focusing on the village’s unity as the people overcome fears of criminals’ retribution if they testify against them. “The Rebels,” Part II, becomes a soap opera detailing numerous relationships, particularly romances, such as one revolving around Jack, who has a child with Bee, and his envy over her apparent affection for Mick. Part III, however, paves the way for “Unfinished Business” with the murder, leading to a series of interrogations helmed by DC Sharon Tyllor and a dizzying whodunnit that’s not easy to figure out. There’s a plethora of characters but never more than La Frenière can handle, and they, along with the setting, help interlock the stories to create a cohesive novel. The second section does occasionally get repetitive; certain events, like Catholic Maureen’s father’s disapproval of her courtship with Isak, who’s Jewish, are unnecessarily reiterated, almost as if “The Rebels” were intended to be its own book. However, the author ends on a high note with the murder mystery, which is unquestionably the best of the three sections. It’s rife with motives and endless finger-pointing while recalling the opening tale when the community’s unity is put to the test. By the end, the murder, as well as a few romances, is adequately resolved.

A trio of stories that stand out individually but, like the Glaston Town residents, are much stronger as a whole.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2014

ISBN: 978-1500599485

Page Count: 524

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.