A quietly devastating but somehow hopeful tale.
Inspired by a heartbreaking true story, De Gregorio’s remarkably restrained novel follows the events that ripple out in the aftermath of tragedy.
The story is simple but mysterious. Shortly after Italian attorney Irina separates from her controlling Swiss husband, Mathias, he disappears with their twin 6-year-old daughters. Five days later, he kills himself, and the girls are nowhere to be found. The police are of little help, and Irina is left to try to assemble a new life for herself, always hoping the children will somehow be located. By the time the novel takes place, several years have passed, and Irina, though still grief-stricken, has fallen in love with gentle Spaniard cartoonist Luis and is surprised to find that suddenly “everything feels like a surprise and a gift.” De Gregorio constructs her brief but potent novel out of sharp fragments: There are letters from Irina to her beloved grandmother and to the marriage counselor who refused to speak to her after Mathias disappeared, Irina's matter-of-fact recollections of the events leading up to the kidnapping, and lists of things that make Irina angry (the inefficiency of the police) or happy (humpback whales and “red wine, when it’s good”). There are also sections labeled “Me About You,” in which the narrator, a writer who has become close to Irina, lets loose her own emotions about the case and her feelings about how Irina has survived. It’s a story about that “missing word” of the title, a word lacking in most languages, a word for parents who have lost children, and the narrator affirms that “losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain.” The daring of the novel is that Irina is not defined simply by that loss, as she might be in a lesser one: Her life is shaped by the disappearance of the children but not destroyed by it.
A quietly devastating but somehow hopeful tale.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-762-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
The time-honored post-breakup trip—“Eat, Shop, Party”—has life-changing results you needn’t believe to enjoy.
The suicide of a friend creates a lifelong bond among three college classmates.
The latest from the author of Something Borrowed opens at the University of Virginia, where four freshmen are about to find the connection that will sustain them through the next four years. They are Lainey, an aspiring actor from California; Tyson, a Black man with law in his future; Summer, a star scholar and varsity athlete; and Hannah, whose conservative Southern mother is going to be very disappointed that she’d rather hang with these three than pledge a sorority. Shortly before their graduation, the unthinkable happens: For reasons no one will ever fully understand, Summer takes her own life. This leads to the eponymous pact: The trio of survivors agree never to take “drastic steps” before reaching out. They are in their early 30s when the first reach-out occurs: Hannah has walked in on her fiance screwing the local Instagram influencer in the bed she just bought for their future marital home. Lainey, now a Hollywood actor on her way up, drops everything and jets in from California to extricate Hannah and exact revenge. Tyson shows up, too, though he has to quit his job and ditch his girlfriend to get there. Once that mess is cleaned up, the three leave on a fantasy getaway on which each gets to pick a stop. The rest of the story unfolds mostly on Capri, always a desirable setting in fiction, where our protagonists hit places like “that beach club [from] TikTok,” La Fontelina. (Do Google it.) Though shocking life changes befall each member of the trio during their Italian sojourn, none are much of a surprise to the reader, who will likely notice the exact moment each plot twist became inevitable. Be quiet and drink your Aperol Spritz.
The time-honored post-breakup trip—“Eat, Shop, Party”—has life-changing results you needn’t believe to enjoy.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593600290
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.
The story of a house, the humans who inhabit it, the ghosts who haunt it, and the New England forest encompassing them all.
In the opening chapter of the fourth novel by Mason—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020)—a pair of rebellious young lovers flee their Puritan Massachusetts village to seek refuge in the “north woods”: “They were Nature’s wards now, he told her, they had crossed into a Realm.” Readers, too, will find themselves in an entrancing fictional realm where the human, natural, and supernatural mingle, all captured in the author’s effortlessly virtuosic prose. Across the centuries, the cabin built by those lovers will transform and house a host of characters, among them Charles Osgood, a British colonist who establishes an apple orchard there; Osgood’s twin daughters, Alice and Mary, whose mutual spinsterhood conceals a bitter jealousy; and Karl Farnsworth, an avid hunter who sees the land as a “sportsman’s paradise” in which to open a private lodge (he hopes to host Teddy Roosevelt despite the “vile” sounds his distraught wife hears in the old structure). Many chapters read like found historical documents, including one side of the correspondence between painter William Henry Teale and his friend Erasmus Nash, a poet, whose visit to the north woods house will have an unexpected impact on both their lives—and those of future inhabitants. Elsewhere we find “Case Notes on Robert S.,” in which a psychiatrist pays a house call to a resident suffering from possible schizophrenia and given to auditory hallucinations while wandering the forest; and “Murder Most Cold,” a dispatch by TRUE CRIME! columnist Jack Dunne, summoned from New York to look into a gory death on the property. Throughout, this loose and limber novel explores themes of illicit desire, madness, the occult, the palimpsest of human history, and the inexorable workings of the natural world (a passage recounting the fateful mating of an elm bark beetle is unforgettable), all handled with a touch that is light and sure.
Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593597033
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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