by Chris Helvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 30, 2017
A quick, satisfying read with a beautiful otherworldly feel; highly recommended for fans of John Steinbeck.
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A novel delivers a rural fable, the story of a man trapped by his own choices.
Fast Eddie Burke always makes his life harder by trying to take the path of least resistance. He works at the coal mine, like almost every man he knows. His wife has left him, and he hints it’s because he didn’t stand up and fight to keep her. He drinks with his buddies in an abandoned house on Fridays. Everyone brings his own liquor. Most of Eddie’s meals are sandwiches from the store or fried squirrel or rabbit he hunts near his house. Just about everything makes him uncomfortable: going to church; hanging around a group of people. So when his co-worker Turp Lawson asks to join the drinking party, Eddie doesn’t know what to make of it. He decides to ask the other guys, and when they agree, Eddie starts down a road that will change his life. Turp seems to be taken with the idea of finally having friends. When Eddie shows the slightest bit of courtesy, Turp asks him over to the house for Sunday dinner. Turp’s wife, Marta, is immediately taken with Eddie and initiates an affair behind her husband’s back. Marta has a habit of belittling Turp, who has never had much confidence. And when Turp brings some questionable moonshine to the drinking bash, he goes off the rails, which only brings Marta and Eddie that much closer. In this short, enjoyable tale, Helvey (Claw Hammer: A Gathering of Stories, 2015, etc.) has a simple but cutting way with his prose. When Eddie happens upon an old man singing, the author has this to say about how the song affects the protagonist: “Even the words sounded strange and tired as though they were very old and had traveled a long way.” In addition, Helvey’s remarkable rural setting and resonant characters are eerily unstuck from time. There are coal mines and family-owned local shops, and the owner of the mine, Eller Whitman, comes off as a dandy millionaire from decades back. But the titular snapshot is a Polaroid, and the cars seem modern.
A quick, satisfying read with a beautiful otherworldly feel; highly recommended for fans of John Steinbeck.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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...
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
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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