THE HALF BROTHER

Name: THE HALF BROTHER
Author: Holly LeCraw
ISBN: 978-0-385-53195-5

by Holly LeCraw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2015

The last 50 pages become a rush of plot contrivances that undermine what until then has been a complicated, engrossing study...

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Incest, racial tension, statutory rape, alcoholism—LeCraw (The Swimming Pool, 2010) throws them all into the stew in this melodrama about family secrets and thwarted love among teachers at an elite New England prep school.

Fresh out of Harvard, Charlie Garrett becomes an English teacher at the Abbott School in Abbottsford, Massachusetts (not to be confused with the actual Abbott Academy which merged with Andover in the 1970s). But Charlie isn't a typical blue blood. He knows little about his father, who he's been told died in Vietnam. His mother, Anita, moved from rural Georgia to Atlanta, where she worked as a nurse, when Charlie was a baby. When she married Hugh Satterthwaite, scion of one of Atlanta’s most established families, Charlie became part of Atlanta’s most exclusive community, though he never felt like he really fit in. Hugh, a devoted stepfather even after the birth of Charlie’s much younger and more charismatic half brother, Nicky, got Charlie into Harvard before drinking himself to death, and Anita pushed Charlie to take the job at Abbott for reasons of her own. Charlie is drawn to chaplain Preston Bankhead, a fellow Southerner, and falls in love with Preston’s daughter, May, nine years his junior. He doesn’t act on his feelings while she’s an Abbott student, but they correspond when she goes to college and begin an ardent affair when she comes home to take care of her father while he's dying of melanoma. But Charlie dumps May after Preston’s funeral for reasons he won't share with her, and May leaves town. Charlie settles in to life as a bachelor teacher. Years later, Nicky, a Harvard grad who’s been traumatized while doing relief work in Afghanistan, takes a job teaching at Abbott, to Charlie’s delight. Then May returns to teach at Abbott as well.

The last 50 pages become a rush of plot contrivances that undermine what until then has been a complicated, engrossing study of characters and relationships.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53195-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

Categories:

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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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.