DRIFTING, FALLING—DIARY OF A CALL GIRL SUICIDE

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DRIFTING, FALLING—DIARY OF A CALL GIRL SUICIDE

Name: DRIFTING, FALLING—DIARY OF A CALL GIRL SUICIDE
Author: A.J. Ullman

by A.J. Ullman ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A tragic and darkly fascinating call girl story that loses some of its edge by trying too hard to get into its main...

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In this novel, the diary of a troubled young girl reveals her life as a prostitute while her therapist lusts after her and tries to learn her secrets.

Ripley Luna dates her college professor, endures nightmares about murdering puppies, and secretly works as a high-class call girl. “A competent courtesan has the ability to converse on a myriad of subjects,” Ripley writes in her diary as she flits from references to the Marquis de Sade to The X-Files, Greek mythology, and her favorite subject, astronauts. While she begins filling pages with her true thoughts, she lies to her new therapist, Dr. Dan Truscott. “Lying is what I do, more so than even laying, lol,” she writes. As Ripley’s journal moves from encounters with her sweetest johns to the ordeals of her childhood, Dan’s obsession with his young patient grows, leading him to follow her after sessions and even to hire a private investigator. He claims to want to protect her, fearing for her safety, but deep down he knows it has more to do with his own disintegrating marriage. Ripley’s own romantic relationship begins to come apart as she and Dan move forward with her psychotherapy. Desperate to understand her, he pushes her more and more toward revisiting the mysterious traumas of her past that have scarred her for life and given her an inclination for suicide. Ullman (Hit or Miss, 2013, etc.) strives for the irreverent, acerbic observations found in Sylvia Plath’s works or Susanna Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted, but Ripley’s first-person narration unfortunately falls short. A glut of lols and unwieldy pop-culture references doesn’t make Ripley feel young or sharp, but instead turns an already unreliable narrator into an unbelievable and uneven character. It’s actually in the cat-and-mouse dialogues with Dan—narrated in the third person—that Ripley really comes to life, and Ullman also seems more comfortable building Dan’s budding obsession. These elements could have been explored more to make the book’s later and more haunting aspects feel less forced.

A tragic and darkly fascinating call girl story that loses some of its edge by trying too hard to get into its main character’s head.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Moonshine Cove Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 12, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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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.