A poignant coming-of-age story about the bonds of friendship, the heartache of first love and navigating the turbulent waters of marriage and family.
Francis “Fran” Hopkins Draper Jr. grew up in the affluent suburb of Chestnut Hill, Pa., with his older sister Heather, his French, socially conscious mother and kowtowing father. He’s quick to point out that his relatives are “Long Island-lock-jawed, garden variety WASPs, a family whose members were born on third base but thought they’d hit a triple.” Fran and his peers are products of private-school education and his parents view themselves as part of the “impoverished aristocracy.” Groome frames his novel as Fran’s midlife memoir—which Heather cajoles her barely 30-year-old sibling into writing—based on his remarkable life that includes dropping out of Dartmouth, two marriages, a decorated tour in the military, a failed baseball career, a successful business career and an ongoing estrangement from his parents. In particular, Fran recounts his experiences in the summer of 1955. Having just graduated from high school, he and his best friend Potter work a summer job in Quebec. Introduced to a beautiful young woman named Lisette, Fran is immediately smitten by this girl who’s nothing like the shallow debutantes back home. Unfortunately, the love affair is short-lived, as the boys soon return home—where Potter must deal with his girlfriend’s potential pregnancy. Although Potter dodges that bullet, Fran and Lisette aren’t so lucky. Despite their upbringing, Fran and Heather are open-minded and focus on an individual’s character rather than on which side of the tracks they were raised. Their mother finds social standing, breeding and appearances to be of the utmost importance, yet compared to their compatriots, the Drapers are struggling financially—and the hypocrisy isn’t lost on her children. The harder she tries to turn the charade into reality by forcing her children into upper-class roles, the more she alienates them. The author deftly renders a sad portrait of a family being pulled apart by an alcoholic mother in denial. Though the narrative’s beginning is a bit bumpy, Groome quickly finds his stride. Writing in accessible, straight-forward prose, Groome creates a touching fictional memoir to cleverly illustrate a life lesson—without endings, there would be no beginnings. A heartfelt, captivating read, packed with familial politics and strife.
Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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