A quiet but moving tale of recovery from the trauma of war.
Following her nursing service during World War I, an emotionally battered young Frenchwoman goes off to live alone in the countryside in this historical novel.
Marie Durant Chagall, the daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant, grows up with her older half sister Solange in Marseille, where they receive an excellent at-home education. Both motherless, the girls help run the household and entertain Papa’s business guests. But Marie wants more than their busy domestic life: “I had an intense need to feel ‘vital’—to move, explore and find myself caught up in places I knew nothing of but wanted to experience nonetheless.” When the Great War breaks out, 17-year-old Marie volunteers to become a nurse. She serves in the notorious Battle of Verdun and witnesses unimaginable horrors, until she herself is badly injured; her physical wounds heal, but she remains traumatized. In 1919, she moves, alone, to a house near the Meuse River left to her by her mother, with only a peddler, Henri, and his donkey as occasional company. Over time, however, her empty house and empty hours are filled, starting with the monthslong stay of three shellshocked soldiers. She finds that caring for them helps her, and even after one commits suicide, she realizes that he “had taught me that I wanted to live.” Henri, meanwhile, continues to prompt Marie with new ideas for little businesses, and later, a visit from Solange awakens many good memories. By the end, Marie feels like she’s part of the world again. In this novel, Noble-Sanderson presents a sensitive account of recovery following the crises of war, and it’s particularly effective in how it anchors its story in domestic details. Cleaning house, making beds, caring for the sick, feeding chickens, sewing aprons—the specificity of each of these tasks allows readers to share Marie’s renewal by paying attention to each moment. When she finally, quietly begins to flower, it’s more dramatic in contrast to these mundane realities. The book also raises intriguing questions about war, injustice and sexism without becoming didactic. Some sections might have benefited from more direct dialogue and less summary, and several ominous bits of foreshadowing aren’t followed up. Despite these minor flaws, however, this is a fine debut.
A quiet but moving tale of recovery from the trauma of war.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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