Seemingly alone after the death of her father, Theena bravely faces a frightening world that is often unfriendly to young women just trying to survive in Craig’s historical novel.
The youngest of three girls, Theena (short for Athena) is suddenly adrift when her father passes away. Before his death, he makes Theena promise to marry rich suitor Randolph Chase if asked. Her father knows, even if Theena doesn’t, that 19th-century Florida is not a nurturing place for a woman. Her mother abandoned the family a while ago, and Theena’s father knew his other two daughters (Hera and Dite—the latter short for Aphrodite) wouldn’t wait long to take their leave of the family homestead. Theena does as her father asked, but her heart isn’t in it. She allows herself to believe she’s in love with Randolph because she knows it’s the smart thing to do, but having grown up in South Florida between the Everglades and Atlantic Ocean, she would much rather take her dog fishing than spend the day inside embroidering with a mother-in-law who thinks she’s nothing more than gold-digging trash. The author has a strong, smart heroine in Theena, though she’s not perfect; she doesn’t always make the “right” decision, but her actions make sense for her in the moment, and it’s those decisions that push the story forward. In grief, she shares a night with her best friend, Billy. Against her better judgment, she can’t help being in love with her sister’s husband, Jack. Craig infuses her tale with rich emotion and, by naming the three main characters after Greek goddesses, she’s able to take a shortcut in describing who these women are; Theena is wise and courageous, Hera is jealous by nature and Dite is a cold beauty. This allows the reader to jump right into the plot, and a dizzying plot it is. Some things seem to happen too quickly with the tipping points occurring off the page. For instance, Theena falls into Jack’s bed, even after she swore that she would be faithful to her husband, as well as swearing that she would never hurt her sister that way, leaving the reader confused as to her motivations. However, it’s such a quick, rip-roaring read that these small holes don’t deflate the overall tale. It’s a fun novel filled with rich characters. The backwaters of post-Civil War South Florida could hardly be further apart from ancient Greece, yet Craig infuses her coming-of-age tale with the pathos and heroism one might find in myths, but on an all-too-human scale.
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Gretchen Craig
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
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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