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THE REDEMPTION OF GEORGE BAXTER HENRY

Husband cheats and mother-in-law pounces in this short, profane, cartoonish novel.

George Henry is partner in a Boston law firm, middle-aged and prosperous, long married to Pearl, his high-school sweetheart. Their sex life has dried up, and George has been having an affair with a hottie in his office building. Then Muriel finds out. She is the mother-in-law from hell, a sharp-tongued sitcom character who has never thought George good enough for her baby girl. Muriel was an Oscar-nominated movie star way back when, with a husband very distantly related to Elvis; now she’s a 91-year-old virago with an ultimatum for George: divorce or counseling. (Pearl doesn’t want a divorce but is afraid of her mother.) The counseling option mandates a time out, which is why, as the story begins, the family are flying to a rented chateau in the South of France. As well as Muriel, there are two teenagers, Billy and Iska. Billy is a super-talented rock musician with a cocaine addiction, so George won’t sign off on his contract unless his son stays clean for four weeks. (Ultimatum No. 2). All this sounds, in George’s narration, like a lame stand-up routine; he uses the F word often enough to rob it of all effectiveness. At first Billy steals the show, threatening to jump off the chateau roof unless George relents on the contract, but his dad locks him up and gets the drug out of his system. It’s George’s turn to act up when he meets the gorgeous Carmen. She owns the local patisserie and, guess what, is the world’s biggest Elvis fan. The sex goddess offers herself to George and the two have daily workouts until Muriel catches them in flagrante. Her Polaroids appear to make divorce inevitable until George shows the old biddy his dossier exposing all her career scandals. Game over.  This Irish author’s dire second novel is a major disappointment after his powerful debut (The Last Estate, 2010).

 

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-57962-220-6

Page Count: 140

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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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THE GREAT ALONE

A tour de force.

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In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.

After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.

A tour de force.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017

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