by Fred Misurella ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A stirring reminder that the most beautiful moments can be frustratingly evanescent and that everyone needs to learn the...
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A middle-aged man makes peace with his life choices in this novel.
Ben Alto was still in his prime when he first met Anne-Marie, an arresting native who completely swept him off his feet, in France. In the present, his marriage to Lee, a New York–based artist, is not without its challenges, beset as it is by the daily plod of domesticity. Ben has carved a life back home in the United States, quashing his hopes of becoming an artist and resorting to teaching art history and writing about painting instead. As he and Lee desperately try to start a family, Ben is haunted by his trajectory: “I had begun to age, and to mellow; I had begun to lose confidence in any sort of important future—as a painter or a critic—and although I tried not to be bitter, my lack of prominence weighed on me.” Eventually, Ben and Lee adopt little Misha and cobble together a life of middle-class plentitude with its attendant joys and disappointments. When a life-altering event shakes the couple out of their complacency, they decide they will travel to Europe again, revisiting their favorite places, including St.-Rémy-de-Provence. Reaching out to Anne-Marie during their visit, Ben finds that life has not been kind to her: she is struggling with a rebellious teenager, Celestine, and her love, Zach Douglas, is slowly losing his battle to cancer. Middle-aged ennui and long-lost loves are tropes that have frequently been mined before, but Misurella (Arrangement in Black and White, 2014, etc.) tinges the story with enough pathos and color to craft a standout. There is plenty of nuance in a narrative that could easily have slipped into melodrama but doesn’t. The gorgeous Provencal countryside—with its rippling lavender fields, quaint markets, and striking abbeys and churches—is rendered vividly; one can almost imagine the page as an artist’s canvas here. Impressionist and postimpressionist paintings of Provence come to mind, including those by Ben’s favorite artist, van Gogh. What emerges is a moving account of the necessary compromises people make in their lives.
A stirring reminder that the most beautiful moments can be frustratingly evanescent and that everyone needs to learn the delicate art of letting go.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5377-2111-8
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Blue Triangle
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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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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