The youngest of triplet sisters asserts her identity in Gross’ fourth novel (The Other Mother, 2007, etc.).
Although all three girls are very close, Clementine’s minutes-older sisters Odette and Olivia are identically beautiful and communicate with a telepathy Clementine, the odd sister out, can never quite match. Odette and Olivia are also both Harvard-educated, happily married doctors and currently pregnant. In contrast, Clementine graduated belatedly from Oberlin (barely acceptable to her high-achieving family) and is now living in her parents’ garage apartment in Princeton while applying to vet schools. She is also single, not yet over the drowning death of her college boyfriend Cameron. Then the triplets’ highly regarded, much sought-after neurosurgeon father doesn’t show up for his rounds one day and remains missing for more than a week. Dr. Lord has been a frequently absent but authoritative, demanding and loving über-dad who has left the day-to-day running of the family to Clementine’s mother, an accomplished and highly educated woman who gave up her career to care for him and the girls. When it becomes apparent that Dr. Lord has told only Olivia where he is, schisms begin to divide the triplets and their mother in new ways. Olivia and Odette no longer seem quite as much alike or united. Their mother’s utter faith in her husband begins to crack. And Clementine realizes that her friendship with Cameron’s roommate Eli, who is doing graduate work in Princeton, is deeper and perhaps less platonic than she’s tried to believe. Dr. Lord’s secret is anticlimactic. But the novel is less concerned with the vaguely out-of-sync details of Dr. Lord’s crimes than with the coming-into-selfhood of Clementine. At its best, the novel delves into the sister relationships, but the triplet hook only goes so far to mitigate the annoying entitlement of the characters and the heavy-handed if familiar plot.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2368-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
This graceful story offers insights into family, friendship, and finding a way to move on after a loss.
A woman whose life has been knocked off balance by her daughter’s absence struggles to regain her equilibrium.
At first glance, Sarah would seem to have it all: a devoted husband, a Brooklyn brownstone, money, good looks (attracting attention even in her late 40s), privilege, the dregs of a successful career as a filmmaker, an agent waiting to support her next project. However, as Hershon’s novel unspools over the course of a long weekend, in which Sarah and her husband, Matthew, are violently mugged in Prospect Park and then travel upstate to reconnect with old friends—a couple named Kiki and Arman—we learn that Sarah’s life is far from perfect. Sarah and Matthew’s troubled 24-year-old daughter, Leda, has vanished from their lives; the stress caused by her yearslong absence has nearly cost Sarah her marriage (she and Matthew have reconciled after a two-year separation) and her career (she can’t write about Leda, yet neither can she write about anything else). Kiki and Arman, too, have their problems as well as a new baby daughter who stirs memories—both pleasant and painful—for Sarah. In clear, compassionate prose, Hershon (A Dual Inheritance, 2013, etc.) conjures characters readers may initially assume they know and then gently and gradually subverts those assumptions, revealing the emotions and difficulties with which these nuanced characters are grappling. Ultimately the author offers notes of hope—that the secrets and sadnesses, disappointments and distress that can damage relationships, derail pursuits, and erode lives when they are held inside and in isolation can resolve when shared; that sometimes finding a way back to one another is the best way to find a way forward.
This graceful story offers insights into family, friendship, and finding a way to move on after a loss.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-26814-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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