Ambling and impossibly old-fashioned: a melodrama in which nothing much happens.
Five families return to a New Hampshire country inn anticipating a long summer idyll. Will the simmering tensions boil over, or will the long, sunny days work their magic?
Novelist Daniel Goldner, who’s been coming to Mount Haven Inn since he was a boy, is seeking solace as his marriage founders. Economist Simon Epstein, his longtime friend, is there for him along with Simon's free-spirited wife and three teenagers. The Edwards family has also been coming to Mount Haven for years, keeping their family vacation inviolate. But this year, as their teenagers squabble and the marriage has lost its luster, Susan Edwards has smuggled in a golden professional opportunity to translate a much-lauded new novel from the French. She’s eager to learn what the novel, which portrays a marriage on the rocks, has to say about her and her husband, Jeff. Grasping Liane Curran sees summering at the inn as a way to experience the ways of old money while her desperate husband, Michael, is hoping for an infusion of that money into his teetering startup. Patrician financier Mark Templeton and his carefully groomed, alcoholic wife, Andrea, return from California to New Hampshire every August to commemorate the loss of their son, Adam, and to offer their condolences to the widow and son he left behind. Wendy and Donny Templeton, who live not far from the inn, dutifully roll up for this mournful ritual of sternly enforced family bonding. Author Goldreich (After Melanie, 2019, etc.) litters the tale with details that read more like 1969 than 2019: A teenager wears Jean Nate perfume; a college student drives a “roadster”; women under 70 wear their hair in “lacquered helmets”; the developer of cutting-edge software has his spreadsheets on paper. Whatever the incidental details, the characters are all seeking an old-fashioned summer: antiquing, kayaking on the lake, piecing together puzzles, and turning to each other for comfort and renewal.
Ambling and impossibly old-fashioned: a melodrama in which nothing much happens.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8972-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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