A prospective adoptive mother examines her past and her conscience prior to embarking on her parental journey.
Molly and her husband, Aidan, involuntarily childless attorneys in San Diego, are going through the fraught process of qualifying to adopt. Molly, 38, has a degree of trepidation about how “open” this adoption is expected to be: is the birth mother, Sienna, expecting to be part of her child’s life in perpetuity? Molly’s misgivings are understandable; she herself is the product of a family in which her birth mother, Amalia, lived close by, and she witnessed the discomfort such proximity created for her adoptive mother, Nora. Molly has not told her husband why she's now estranged from both Amalia, who's dying, and Nora—in fact, she's told him almost nothing about her past. The present narrative is interspersed with chapters flashing back 24 years to Morrison Ridge, a large tract of family-owned land in the wooded hills near Asheville, North Carolina: Molly is 14, living with her mother, Nora, and her father, Graham, a psychotherapist who has invented a new behavioral regimen, “Pretend Therapy.” Multiple sclerosis has left Graham paralyzed from the neck down. Molly is a bookish, precocious teen who types Graham’s manuscripts and accompanies him on book tours. However when she falls under the influence of a classmate, Stacy, who introduces her to older boys, the plot takes a major detour through teen-novel territory: Molly’s main preoccupation, enabled by a Judy Blume novel no less, is now losing her virginity. In the meantime, Graham and his relatives are wrangling over the fate of the Ridge: one faction wants to sell to a developer while others, including Molly’s grandmother and Graham, want to keep the land pristine. While the family argues and Molly’s hormones run wild, something else is going on that will make for the explosive revelation at novel’s end. Marred by excessive sentimentality and superfluous exposition that dilutes the drama.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01074-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quietly captivating debut.
A first-time novelist explores the curses and blessings of a childhood shaped by unreliable parents and an unforgiving sea.
This spiky, elliptical novel, which takes place on a fictional island off the coast of Southern California, begins with a beached whale. The inescapable odor and massive, macabre presence of the corpse are just two of the challenges Evangeline faces as she prepares for her wedding. Her long-absent mother has arrived uninvited. And it’s possible that the groom, a fisherman, has died at sea. While the whale is, in any practical sense, the least of Evie's worries, it feels horribly emblematic of her circumstances—maybe even of her whole existence. As she tells her story, moving back and forth in time, it becomes clear that Evie has a history of finding fixations to distract her from the most difficult aspects of her life. Ultimately, though, the subject she would like most to escape is the one she studies the most closely: her father. Evie’s dad is a beguiling figure, someone who provides for himself and his daughter as a raconteur and a drug dealer. When Evie’s a kid, his exceptional charm is just as crucial to their survival as his ability to score cocaine or produce epic weed. Sometimes they are the guests of wealthy friends who like to party. Sometimes they live in cheap apartments. Sometimes they are homeless. This instability makes Evie somewhat immune to her father’s charisma. As she grows up, we see how this colorful but volatile upbringing leaves her with real emotional deficits. Van Meter does not allow her narrator to luxuriate in self-pity, though. Some of the most heartbreaking moments in this novel are the most simply told, and there are scenes of beauty and magic and dry humor amid the chaos. And Evie is self-aware enough to acknowledge her own complexities and shortcomings.
A quietly captivating debut.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-859-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A series only works when the characters are worth following over the long haul, and Hilderbrand is a master, making for a...
In the last installment of the charming Winter Street trilogy, the Quinn family braces for the storm of the century.
Unlike the first two novels, which span just a few days over two consecutive Christmases at the Quinn's historic Nantucket inn, the finale covers much of a year and shifts the focus from patriarch Kelley Quinn to his four children. Youngest son Bart is still missing in action in Afghanistan—the light in his childhood room has remained on for the past 18 months. Eldest son Patrick is serving the last few months of a prison sentence for fraud, while his wife Jennifer's patrician life is crumbling thanks to prescription drugs. Kevin, the flaky middle son approaching middle age, is finally coming into his own with a successful beachside eatery and a blooming confidence—he's finally proposed to girlfriend Isabelle. Lastly, Ava is in the enviable position (or not, depending on her mood) of dating both carpenter Nathaniel and vice principal Scott. Adding to her romantic confusion, she meets Potter, a professor at Columbia, who offers her a vision of a life beyond the island. As the Quinn children finally iron out their lives, Kelley confronts the end of his own—his cancer, thought to be in remission, has moved to his brain, with increasingly debilitating results. All is brought to a frantic head on Christmas Eve, the date of Kevin and Isabelle's wedding, when an impending snowstorm strands the guests off-island. If this all seems a bit soapy, Hilderbrand's tight pacing and breezy tone keep the story from heavy-handedness. But be warned: when Bart's MIA status finds resolution, tears may be shed.
A series only works when the characters are worth following over the long haul, and Hilderbrand is a master, making for a satisfying conclusion to her Christmas at the Inn story.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9780316261173
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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