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Memory Stones

Name: Memory Stones
Author: Dena Tarkington

by Dena Tarkington ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A cleareyed look at overcoming family trauma, but several subplots beg further exploration.

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In this debut novel, a troubled woman of 58 battles her many demons by seeking answers to her family’s disintegration and by learning to enjoy the natural world.

As Nia Meyer begins her story, she is fishing alone on the Salt River along Florida’s Gulf Coast. She details the process with an evident understanding of the natural world acquired through her late mother’s Native American heritage and her long absent father’s knowledge of the region and myriad skills. Nia’s boat becomes stuck in mud overnight as a storm rages. She withstands the ordeal, but her fear and isolation prompt long reveries, which are braided through her current situation and explain her unhappiness: “It was a long time ago, when my heart was so broken I could not breathe.” The sudden loss of her husband, a 40-year-old oncologist, sent her reluctantly into therapy decades ago with psychologist Paul Horton. He attempts to relieve her of the burden of her “memory stones”: all of her recollections, painful as well as happy. She stingily offers him small pebbles from her past. She grew up in Florida. When her mother died after becoming involved in a cultish church, their father abandoned Nia and her siblings. The four children were “adopted” by the church’s sinister leaders and unspecified abuse ensued. Nia escaped, met the successful but problematic Joel Meyer, and moved with him to Virginia, where they eventually married. Her psychotherapy enabled her to return to Florida, reconnect with family members and memories, and begin a new social life. The meandering plot touches on Nia’s childhood, her current life, her therapist’s family issues, Native American beliefs, along with much fishing lore, but most issues warrant additional coverage. The language and actions of doctors are depicted unrealistically: Horton describes Meyer’s death to his therapist: “ ‘Brain aneurysm,’ he replied. ‘It blew with such force it turned his brain into hamburger. At least, that’s what the surgeon told my patient.’ ” He later violates ethical strictures by contacting Nia’s sister on his own. The author does reveal some profound insights about abuse and dysfunction in families and how people heal.

A cleareyed look at overcoming family trauma, but several subplots beg further exploration.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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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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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.