A thoughtful and gripping family tale that will haunt readers long after finishing it.
A novel takes a deep dive into what goes wrong—and right—between a surrogate mother and the gay couple whose fertilized eggs she carries.
Donovan Gallo-Rigsdale and Chip Rigsdale have a solid marriage and now really want children. They engage Maggie Wingate to carry their fertilized eggs to term. This she does; all goes smoothly; and Donovan and Chip become the proud parents of Kai and Teddy. But a DNA test done some years later shows no genetic connection between Donovan and Kai. The egg he fertilized did not attach itself, and Kai is in fact the son of Maggie and her husband, Nick, conceived shortly after she accepted the donor eggs. This is extremely rare but is possible. To say that this news is cataclysmic is an understatement. Donovan and Chip have proved to be wonderful parents, but so are Maggie and Nick. The real tragedy—and strength—of this riveting story is that there are no villains here. The battle over Kai begins, the point of view toggling between Maggie and Donovan. Friedland is a very talented writer who creates rounded characters and gets deep into their heads: “The window” in Maggie’s brain “becomes a door, then a long hallway…into an enormous stadium, an arena, filled with” a certain dawning understanding. Maggie understands how much Donovan must love Kai, but the child is her own flesh and blood, and she and Nick have always wanted a brother for their son, Wyatt. Donovan has the added fear that the judge overseeing the case might be homophobic. But Donovan is no less of a fighter. And Donovan and Maggie are clashing not over a pet or a painting but a sensitive and very bright human being. It would seem that Kai is just as torn as his parents. Indeed, the underlying question in a case like this has to be what really, besides biology, defines a parent. (It is hard to imagine a better novel for a book club discussion.) The conclusion to all this comes with an absolutely stunning revelation.
A thoughtful and gripping family tale that will haunt readers long after finishing it.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-463097-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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