The structure is challenging, and Murphy has a tendency to overwrite in fraught moments, a risk that comes from emotional...
A grim portrait of the forces that derail an American family whose members find that forgiveness might take much of a lifetime.
By the time the three Thurber siblings are growing up in western New York state in the late 1970s, the region’s economic woes have bred poverty, toughness, and cruelty. Their parents’ drinking leads to “fights that ripped us clean of our flesh and left only raw notes of nerve ends,” says Jamie, the only daughter. The boys, Lewis and Connor, play a “violent, cruel sort of football.” The mother, Catrin, is an artist whose “sadness haunted her.” Her husband, Terrance, decides the only way he can save himself and the kids from his alcoholism is to leave. In chapters spanning the years 1978 to 2018 and narrated mostly by the siblings, Murphy (The Boat Runner, 2017, etc.) takes disconnected snapshots of lives scarred by brutality, broken marriages, loneliness, and misfortune. Lewis goes to sea for years, with the Navy and as a merchant mariner. Connor glimpses domestic normalcy, but birds keep smashing into his picture windows. Jamie’s husband returns from military service badly wounded and then they lose a baby right after her birth. Terrance falls in love with a woman who is bipolar, and he’s electrocuted while working, one of four nasty accidents that befall family members. He hopes he can use the financial settlement to persuade his children to visit him. There are gaps of several years between chapters and little to link them but brief references to a sibling or parent. The fragmentation is fitting but results in something that can feel more like a short story collection than a novel.
The structure is challenging, and Murphy has a tendency to overwrite in fraught moments, a risk that comes from emotional honesty and trying to make the bleak eloquent.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285607-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.
After facing tragedy and betrayal in New York, an aspiring fashion designer escapes to her idyllic Pacific coast hometown to raise her best friend’s two young children and finds inspiration, redemption, and love in the unexpected journey.
Caroline Shelby always dreamed of leaving tiny Oysterville, Washington, and becoming a couturier. After years of toil, she finally has a big break only to discover a famous designer has stolen her launch line. When she accuses him, he blackballs her, so she’s already struggling when her best friend, Angelique, a renowned model from Haiti whose work visa has expired, shows up on her doorstep with her two biracial children, running from an abusive partner she won’t identify. When Angelique dies of a drug overdose, Caroline takes custody of the kids and flees back to her hometown. She reconnects with her sprawling family and with Will and Sierra Jensen, who were once her best friends, though their relationships have grown more complicated since Will and Sierra married. Caroline feels guilty that she didn’t realize Angelique was abused and tries to make a difference when she discovers that people she knows in Oysterville are also victims of domestic violence. She creates a support group that becomes a welcome source of professional assistance when some designs she works on for the kids garner local interest that grows regional, then national. Meanwhile, restless Sierra pursues her own dreams, leading to Will and Caroline’s exploring some unresolved feelings. Wiggs’ latest is part revenge fantasy and part romantic fairy tale, and while some details feel too smooth—how fortunate that every person in the circle has some helpful occupation that benefits Caroline's business—Caroline has a challenging road, and she rises to it with compassion and resilience. Timelines alternating among the present and past, both recent and long ago, add tension and depth to a complex narrative that touches on the abuse of power toward women and the extra-high stakes when the women involved are undocumented. Finally, Wiggs writes about the children’s race and immigration status with a soft touch that feels natural and easygoing but that might seem unrealistic to some readers.
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-242558-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring...
Quite a departure from Dugoni’s dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite (The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.
Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed “the devil boy” by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school’s principal and Freemon’s enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone—the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian—represents new challenges. Even Sam’s graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn’t rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother’s unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4900-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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