A defiantly obscure tale, verging on the surreal, with an equally nebulous target audience.
Crutchley (Bad Days in Broadacre, 2016, etc.) offers a sprawling novel of time distortions and life temptations.
Alfred and Victor, twin soldiers in World War I, are cast adrift in the English Channel and briefly encounter a Napoleonic French general and his servant rowing a boat. Oliver Armstrong, an English businessman in the present day, is on the cross-channel ferry when he witnesses a shipwreck that no-one else on the ferry sees. Stanley Sedgewick, a retired English fireman, bumps into the aforementioned Frenchmen (quite literally) while swimming the channel. Walter Little, a high-level diplomat, finds himself typing the text of a historical document that he has no previous knowledge of, while traveling by train through the Channel Tunnel. It turns out that time is being warped, and Alice Blumen, an American reporter, attempts to reconcile these various incidents. During her investigations, she comes into contact with other affected people, including Calvin Cross, an English retiree with wanderlust; and Darlene, a French medium. Somehow, she knows that everything is related, and in some way, it will all culminate at England’s Battley Airport. Some aspects of Crutchley’s prose are distracting, such as the occasional overly enthusiastic use of adverbs and the lack of commas at the end of direct speech: “ ‘The meeting was nothing’ arrogantly replied [airport manager] Mildrew angrily.” Crutchley presents a plethora of characters with rambling histories that add to their uniqueness but often offer no clear bearing on the plot. Alone, none of these people demands the reader’s attention; en masse, they’re like a lashed-together raft that makes its way downstream, gathering detritus and momentum in roughly equal measure. The result may frustrate readers who are accustomed to more clear-cut and direct plots. However, this isn’t a novel that need be approached literally; rather, it can be taken as a blank-page analogy of life and fate. Readers with a bent for abstract expressionism may well see this random gathering of characters—and the aimless inevitability of the book’s pilgrimage—and find something of their own lives within.
A defiantly obscure tale, verging on the surreal, with an equally nebulous target audience.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 382
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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