A young mother goes on a quest to track down the father of her child, who abducted their baby daughter shortly after her birth.
When Plum Valentine is in high school in Brooklyn, her immigrant parents plan a seemingly routine visit to their native Jamaica. Once there, however, the parents insist that Plum stay behind, leaving her at a strict boarding school to keep her from getting into trouble. As it turns out, trouble manages to find the pretty 17-year-old anyway. After Lenworth, a 25-year-old chemistry lab assistant, tutors Plum, the two end up having an illicit relationship. As the novel opens, Plum is in the hospital, recovering from having given birth to their daughter, when she discovers that Lenworth has abducted the baby. Plum realizes she has been abandoned yet again. But that pain pales in comparison to the yawning emptiness she experiences at the loss of her child. Traveling back to Brooklyn, Plum tries to set her life back on a path to normalcy. Determined to find her daughter, however, she sets off repeatedly, over the course of more than a decade, to track her ex-lover and their little girl. Hemans delivers a cat-and-mouse chase that brings Plum back to Jamaica over and over again even as she leads a parallel life in the United States. The taut storyline sacrifices character development with the net result that both Plum and Lenworth come across as caricatures, their motivations and desires one-dimensional and murky till the end. Lenworth’s sudden embrace of spirituality as he realizes his profound error of judgment also feels forced. By concentrating mostly on the minutiae of the chase, the narrative misses mining the deeper emotional range it could have achieved had it addressed Plum’s grief with more nuance.
A tightly knit story about a mother’s loss that too often veers into melodrama.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59709-845-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | LITERARY FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE
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A knowing, loving evocation of people trying to survive with their personalities and traditions intact.
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In this unhurried, kaleidoscopic story, the efforts of Native Americans to save their lands from being taken away by the U.S. government in the early 1950s come intimately, vividly to life.
Erdrich’s grandfather Patrick Gourneau was part of the first generation born on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. As the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the mid-1950s, he had to use all the political savvy he could muster to dissuade Utah Sen. Arthur V. Watkins (whom Erdrich calls a “pompous racist” in her afterword) from reneging on long-held treaties between Native Americans and the federal government. Erdrich's grandfather is the inspiration for her novel’s protagonist, Thomas Wazhushk, the night watchman of the title. He gets his last name from the muskrat, "the lowly, hardworking, water-loving rodent," and Thomas is a hard worker himself: In between his rounds at a local factory, at first uncertain he can really help his tribe, he organizes its members and writes letters to politicians, "these official men with their satisfied soft faces," opposing Watkins' efforts at "terminating" their reservation. Erdrich reveals Thomas' character at night when he's alone; still reliable and self-sacrificing, he becomes more human, like the night he locks himself out of the factory, almost freezes to death, and encounters a vision of beings, "filmy and brightly indistinct," descending from the stars, including Jesus Christ, who "looked just like the others." Patrice Paranteau is Thomas' niece, and she’s saddled with a raging alcoholic father and financial responsibility for her mother and brother. Her sister, Vera, deserts the reservation for Minneapolis; in the novel’s most suspenseful episode, Patrice boldly leaves home for the first time to find her sister, although all signs point to a bad outcome for Vera. Patrice grows up quickly as she navigates the city’s underbelly. Although the stakes for the residents of Turtle Mountain will be apocalyptic if their tribe is terminated, the novel is more an affectionate sketchbook of the personalities living at Turtle Mountain than a tightly plotted arc that moves from initial desperation to political triumph. Thomas’ boyhood friend Roderick returns as a ghost who troubles Thomas in his night rounds, for example; Patrice sleeps close to a bear and is vastly changed; two young men battle for Patrice’s heart.
A knowing, loving evocation of people trying to survive with their personalities and traditions intact.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-267118-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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