A wondrously executed parable, sure to attract readers from every walk of life.
This post-apocalyptic novel sees the villagers of Harpers Ferry running from a marauding army of Christian extremists.
In the not-too-distant future, a technologically enhanced strain of influenza has destroyed the modern world. Called the Great Sickness, this disease ended the warfare between Islamic extremists in the Middle East and their mostly Christian counterparts in America. Once-great cities are now overgrown ruins. People have returned to simple village life, and Jason is a watchman in Harpers Ferry, the West Virginia town. While on duty, he encounters a severely wounded man who warns of an army on horseback, violently demanding loyalty to Jesus Christ. Skeptical, the Harpers Ferry elders send Jason to nearby Leesburg, Va., for proof. There, he witnesses the brutal execution of a forced laborer, which confirms that standing against these men and their old god means death. A man named Pravus leads the Christian Empire (based in New Atlanta) and dreams of conquering the rest of the former U.S. He also wants revenge on the traitorous Mordecai, who abandoned war to peacefully spread Christianity. When Mordecai has a strange vision, he heads west, toward Indianapolis. The people of Harpers Ferry, now led by Jason and a council of talented youths, likewise travel west to outrun the Christian horde. Author Livingston (Marketing in the Round, 2012, etc.) presents the perils of medievallike life with unflagging realism. He threatens his characters with food shortages, wolf attacks, river crossings and egotistical outbursts. But sharp, bracing prose makes the quieter moments just as powerful: “A fever, now apparent in the man’s pale, sweat-streaked face, had wasted his long frame.” Such evocative writing helps the novel’s valuable message of religious moderation shine through: “Forced faith breeds sins, encourages hatred, terror, and violence,” Mordecai tells Pravus. “Your brutal teaching denies the essential virtues of faith, hope, and charity.” Only later, when Livingston dictates the drama instead of revealing it through his excellent dialogue and characterization, does the story slow. Fortunately, a stunning, irresistible cliffhanger erases this minor quibble.
A wondrously executed parable, sure to attract readers from every walk of life.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Lady Soleil, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
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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