A badass bildungsroman.
The story of two siblings, estranged after an incident that throws their lives off the rails.
In Everett, Washington, in 1980, 13-year-old Venus Black shoots her stepfather in the head. When she goes to a juvenile detention center, she leaves behind her younger brother, Leo, who has developmental differences. He is 7 “but acts more like he’s 3 or 4” and has extreme and adverse reactions to loud noises, being touched, colors that aren’t right, and disruptions of his routine. Venus is the only one who can calm him, and when she's arrested, he is inconsolable, unable to understand where she's gone and why he's staying with a neighbor. When he's kidnapped a few days later, it is Venus who's inconsolable, unable to forgive her mother, Inez, for this carelessness or for the ignorance and dismissiveness which triggered the murder. The rest of the book follows the siblings’ parallel stories. Venus spends five years in juvie for the murder of her stepfather. When she's released, she attempts to build a new life for herself in Seattle, avoiding her mother and her past altogether. Using a fake name, she gets a job at a bakery and a run-down room to live in with a patchwork family—a man named Mike and his niece, Piper. Meanwhile, Leo’s kidnapper has abandoned him, luckily to a father and daughter, Tony and Tessa, who love him very much and care for him compassionately. Over the course of the novel, it becomes very clear why Venus killed her stepfather and why she has such a hard time accepting the affection of male strangers. It also becomes clear that crime and punishment is not black and white, that we all have survival instincts beyond what we might imagine we’re capable of, and that kinship can look nothing like a nuclear family and still harbor profound love. The plot follows all-too-convenient points to a predictably saccharine end, but it’s impossible not to root for this strong, willful girl as she finds her place in the world and for her brother as he tries to make sense of it.
A badass bildungsroman.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59218-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga—it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society....
An island off the coast of Maine: Let's buy it, dear.
"Handsome, tanned, Kitty and Ogden Milton stood ramrod straight and smiling into the camera on the afternoon in 1936 when they had chartered a sloop, sailed out into Penobscot Bay, and bought Crockett's Island." This photo is clipped to a clothesline in the office of professor Evie Milton in the history department at NYU; she found it while cleaning out her mother's apartment after her death. "Since the afternoon in the photograph, four generations of her family had eaten round the table on Crockett's Island, clinked the same glasses, fallen between the same sheets, and heard the foghorn night after night." Evie jokes with an African-American colleague that the photograph represents "the Twilight of the WASPs," then finds herself snappishly defending them. Blake's (The Postmistress, 2010, etc.) third novel studies the unfolding of several storylines over the generations of this family: deaths and losses shrouded in secrecy, terrible errors in judgment, thwarted love—much of it related to or caused by the family's attitudes toward blacks and Jews. While patriarch Ogden Milton presided unflinchingly over his firm's involvement with the Nazis, his granddaughter Evie Milton is married to a Jewish man—who, like any person of his background who has visited Crockett's Island, complains that there's not a comfortable chair in the place. Kitty Milton, the matriarch, twisted by social mores into repressing her tragedies and ignoring her conscience, is a fascinating character, appealing in some ways, pitiable and repugnant in others. Through Kitty and her daughters, Blake renders the details of anti-Semitic prejudice as felt by this particular type of person. Reminiscent of the novels of Julia Glass, the story of the Miltons engages not just with history and politics, but with the poetry of the physical world. "The year wheeled round on its colors. Summer's full green spun to gold then slipping gray and resting, resting white at the bottom of the year...then one day the green whisper, the lightest green, soft and growing into the next day...suddenly, impossibly, it was spring again."
This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga—it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society. Its convincing characters and muscular narrative succeed on both counts.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11025-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
A cheerful and heartwarming look at friendship, family, love, and new beginnings.
After arranging a monthlong Paris vacation with her husband of 25 years, Grace discovers he’s cheating on her and takes the trip on her own.
Grace’s complicated childhood made her determined to carve out a picture-perfect life through organization and order. She loves being a happily married part-time French teacher with a college-bound daughter. So it’s a shock when, on Valentine’s Day, Grace shares her 25th wedding-anniversary surprise—a monthlong summer trip to Paris—and her husband David’s response is to tell her he’s having an affair and wants a divorce. Devastated, she decides to take the trip herself. In Paris, Grace’s purse is snatched and Audrey, a dyslexic English teen who can barely speak French, saves it. Audrey is living and working in the Paris bookshop Grace’s grandmother asked her to visit, and Grace winds up helping her during her shifts and renting an apartment over the shop. Audrey prods Grace to let go a little, gives her a makeover, and encourages her to meet up with her first lover. Grace inspires Audrey to explore some of her own talents and offers calm, affectionate support to the younger woman, whose home life has always been fraught thanks to an alcoholic mother. When simultaneous family crises happen, Audrey and Grace lean on each other and offer empathy and insight that lead to new possibilities on a variety of fronts. Morgan’s (The Christmas Sisters, 2018, etc.) new novel is an imaginative and charming coming-of-age—and greeting-middle-age—story with a bit of a fairy-tale feel, especially given the Paris setting. A few details ask readers to suspend disbelief, but for the most part, the story and characters are delightful enough that they won’t mind.
A cheerful and heartwarming look at friendship, family, love, and new beginnings.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-50754-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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