A gripping tale of suspense, family dynamics and trauma’s fallout.
Schweig’s debut novel is a psychological murder mystery that traces the undoing of a family after tragedy strikes.
The Harris family, by all appearances, has it all in. Wealthy, beautiful and adored, parents Jim and Mary Beth enjoy the good life with their four children and many friends in idyllic Monroeville, Mo. But all is not as it seems both for the community and its favorite family—one night, Jim Harris is murdered while dozing in his home, unraveling the security of his family. As the police swarm, eager to determine who could have done the unthinkable, each member of the Harris family changes dramatically in the aftermath of their tragic loss. Mary Beth sheds her old skin as the domestic mother and emerges as a promiscuous femme fatale entangled in a string of affairs. This raises suspicion within her own son, witness to the fact that his mother “now moved, talked and even drove the car with a personal authority he has never seen…she had transformed herself into…a freewheeling spirit…as if some yoke had been lifted from her soul.” Even more disturbing than Mary Beth’s shocking response to her husband’s death is the contrast to the reaction of her daughter, Jennifer Harris, whose trauma from losing her father has left her unresponsive and emotionally scarred. Mary Beth blithely ignores Jennifer’s obvious need for help, leaving the problem to psychiatrist Dr. Timothy Adler to solve. But will his own emotional baggage prevent him from seeing this through? Did someone from Jennifer’s own family kill Jim, and is she the one who knows? Told in quick chapters and straightforward prose, this mystery novel takes on grief, trauma, murder and even insanity with a deft hand. The layers of insight and research are apparent as the characters struggle with one another and themselves with an admirable verisimilitude. Readers who find mysteries to be lacking in depth and character development will be pleased to find both areas well tended to here, executed effectively within a fast-paced and exciting read.
A gripping tale of suspense, family dynamics and trauma’s fallout.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1612962733
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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