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NOT FROM THE STARS

Name: NOT FROM THE STARS
Author: Christina Britton Conroy

by Christina Britton Conroy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2017

A fun read when the story slows down and allows the characters to engage with one another.

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A Victorian theater provides a home for outcasts in Conroy’s (But from Thine Eyes, 2017, etc.) historical novel.

Homosexuality is illegal in late-19th-century London, so handsome young actor Jeremy O’Connell must keep his relationship with fellow thespian Tommy Quinn a secret outside of their social circle. Jeremy and Tommy are preparing for a small production of Much Ado About Nothing when ingénue Katherine Stewart arrives to play Hero, fresh from her family’s traveling variety act and heartbroken that her sweetheart, Simon Camden, is leaving London. Simon asks Jeremy to look after Katherine, and Jeremy grudgingly provides the naïve actress with acting lessons and half a bed in his tiny flat. Jeremy’s annoyance with Katherine gradually transforms into platonic love, though, and the two settle into a fake marriage, living as man and wife while each pursues his or her own affairs. Tommy is later imprisoned for sexual misconduct, but Jeremy and Katherine become theatrical celebrities, starting their own prominent acting company and teaching drama classes that attract starry-eyed student Rory Cookingham. These characters, however, only occupy about half of the book. Other chapters focus on Elisa Roundtree, a beautiful, isolated teenage girl desperately trying to escape an impending, forced marriage to a brutal man. Her plight draws the attention of her school’s smitten new art teacher, who tries to help her. The characters’ stories often feel oddly unrelated to one another, and it’s especially unclear, until quite late, how Elisa’s plotline relates to the actors’. The actors’ chapters often present intriguing setups. However, they rush through them; Jeremy’s feelings toward Katherine, for example, mutate from annoyance to adoration, but more through summary than scene work. Their scenes also lack a sustained conflict, as the author seems more focused on setting up Book II than offering compelling plotlines in Book I. The characters tend to be underdeveloped, overall, but they’re still enjoyable when given good plotlines. Elisa’s storyline, for instance, is far more engaging than the thespians’; she becomes increasingly desperate as her wedding day approaches, experimenting with both acquiescence and defiance.

A fun read when the story slows down and allows the characters to engage with one another.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 213

Publisher: Endeavour Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

- BOOK REVIEW
I WANT TO GO TO LITHUANIA OR HOW TO HAVE FUN WITH YOUR AGING PARENTS
by Christina Britton Conroy illustrated by Larry Conroy

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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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- SEEN & HEARD
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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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.

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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.