A fresh, enticingly told coming-of-age story.
A college student returns to her small hometown and must confront various ghosts from her past and present.
Amiah Williams left Kingsley, Alberta, for college in Vancouver after her disastrous four-year relationship with Mike, the small town’s golden boy, ended. When her father suffers a catastrophic leg injury, she returns home to work on her family’s ranch and support her parents but immediately comes face to face with her ex as well as her former best friend and a potential new suitor, Alek. To complicate matters even further, Amiah walks into the grocery store to find herself on the front page of the Inquirer, Kingsley’s anonymously written gossip tabloid, with the headline: “Miah the Man-Eater: Miah makes out with her former BF’s younger brother in front of Mike!” Amiah immediately calls Nathan, her best friend from Vancouver, and it's cleverly revealed that the two are actually the co-writers and -publishers of the paper, which primarily bases its stories on tips and photos shared via email by townspeople. Amiah is shocked Nathan chose to write the story about her, but he points out that the Inquirer couldn't ignore multiple tips or it would raises suspicions about who was behind it. With Nathan's support, Amiah begins to slowly reckon with her relationship with Mike, and reform relationships with everyone else, even as she and Nathan continue to write and produce issues of the Inquirer, but when her parents discover what she's doing, the tabloid no longer seems like a harmless way to pay student loans. A bildungsroman that never drags, Dawn’s debut novel is appealing both in its innovation—it intersperses newspaper articles from the Inquirer throughout—and its unexpected insights from Amiah, its well-drawn narrator. Though at times there are too many minor characters and backstories, the novel captures both the intimacy and, at times, suffocating nature of a small town without lapsing into derision of Kingsley or its residents. Dawn sets a brisk, engaging pace while tactfully dealing with the nuances of coercive relationships, the strain of living up to appearances and expectations, and the costs of finding one’s voice.
A fresh, enticingly told coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-988732-67-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: NeWest Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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