by Felicia Kate Solomon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2019
A quiet thriller that succeeds in mirroring life’s complex and jarring pathways.
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In this debut novel, a teenage girl displays disturbing behavior while her frayed home life worsens.
The year is 1989, and 16-year-old Lucia Goldman lives with her mother, Valerie, in a shabby London apartment. Lucia has two older half-siblings from Valerie’s first marriage, Ben and Tim. The girl’s father, Colin, has grown emotionally distant since remarrying and retiring to Spain. Worst of all, Valerie drinks and frequently vents her frustration with life on her daughter, which leads to shouting matches and even physical violence. Lucia loathes her mother and uses pain, like radiator burns, to dull the present moment (“Pain pauses time”). Stress also causes a strange pulse to throb between her legs. One evening, Lucia is concentrating on homework when she discovers some water staining her paper. She can’t discern how it got there, but the notion of a leak in the apartment gives her mother hysterical flashbacks to a flood in 1979. The novelty of the situation energizes Lucia, and so she starts spilling water here and there in secret. When Ben becomes involved, he calls out Lucia for the mischief. But the situation becomes serious when a malicious force introduces itself as Ginger and warns Lucia: “Kill or I will.” Does this poltergeist have something to do with Colin’s disconnect from his daughter? In this charged, though delicately wrought period piece, Solomon flashes between 1989 and Lucia’s earlier years visiting her father. Sedate and eerie prose employs the senses fabulously, as in the line “She studies the patch of water. It looks like a goat’s head with horns from where she stands.” Certain details of Lucia’s childhood, including sharing a bed with her father, are odd at first. Later, Colin’s mental health deteriorates and creeping realizations hit Lucia and readers simultaneously. Throughout, seeing her suffer a traumatic adolescence is heartbreaking, and it is to the author’s credit that this narrative proceeds much like a memoir. A psychic investigator speaks to readers in their darkest moments when he tells Lucia: “Flow with life, my child, not against it.”
A quiet thriller that succeeds in mirroring life’s complex and jarring pathways.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
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
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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