A short novelistic gem that delivers a time capsule of 1977 Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
A retired professor of astronomy and astrophysics offers a fictionalized debut memoir about a young family’s holiday that becomes a love letter to Pittsburgh.
It’s 1977 and 5-year-old Jean Capriotti is adjusting to life since the birth of her brother Chris. Still the only girl in a family of five, she has sacrificed youngest child status. When her parents announce the clan will be spending Christmas with her grandparents on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Jean’s main concern is that Santa Claus will not find her, although her well-meaning parents, her father in particular, believe her concern is attributable to jealousy over her baby brother. Her father, the first-person narrator of the story, attempts to overcompensate, and his plans seem to go awry. But with the support of his wife, Carole, and three older sons, he manages to convince Jean they can leave their home near Columbus, Ohio, for the holiday. The family embarks on a harrowing journey from Ohio to the Pittsburgh area—a trip complicated by snow squalls and high winds that make driving the VW bus a challenge. The father distracts his family from the scary, cold drive by telling them stories of Pittsburgh’s history. Upon arrival, he wastes no time in going to the Saxon Inn, where he eagerly partakes of Iron City Beer and Old Overholt rye whiskey and runs into none other than Santa. Santa’s subsequent visit to Jean restores her faith in her father. Eugene R. Capriotti, a Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, native, captures the true essence of Pittsburgh—not just in the late ’70s, with its obsession with Steelers football, but with comments such as “Pittsburgh is the capital of Western Pennsylvania.” His loving descriptions of the food of his Italian family and his wife’s Slovak relatives, the unique terrain of western Pennsylvania, and the glorious entrance to the city via the parkway will ring true with those familiar with Pittsburgh, and should induce others to want to visit. The author also skillfully evokes late-’70s family life, including watching “Happy Days” on TV and sending children to catechism classes.
A short novelistic gem that delivers a time capsule of 1977 Ohio and western Pennsylvania.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-1704-8
Page Count: 100
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2018
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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