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SEEKING HIDDEN TREASURES

A COLLECTION OF CURIOUS TALES AND ESSAYS

A set of cheerful works about searching for gold of all kinds.

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Magner (Free to Decide, 2015) explores the concept of treasure hunting in this debut collection of short stories and essays.

Since ancient times, the promise of gold has captivated people’s imaginations. After all, stumbling upon wealth in the form of buried treasure, lost shipwrecks, or untapped mines is much preferable to acquiring it the old-fashioned way. Owners of such prizes can also go to great lengths to keep them safe. These subjects inspired a favorite subgenre of campfire tale, and with this collection of 12 short stories and four essays, Magner continues that legacy, addressing humanity’s capacity for imagination and ingenuity. In “Gold for the Taking,” an apparent homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 tale “The Gold-Bug,” a perennially broke man learns that his father hasn’t left him his hoard of gold coins in his will, but rather has hidden them—with instructions indicating that whoever solves the riddle of its hiding place will become its owner. In “The Combination,” a man finds the combination to a safe written in an old library book about chess and seeks out the granddaughter of the man who wrote the note. In “Miracle in Montana,” a man discovers that his ailing uncle is sitting atop a literal gold mine. In both the stories and essays, Magner’s prose is light and relaxed: “The May sunshine was pleasantly warm on the back of his neck and shoulders,” one tale begins. “The young Catholic priest’s black shirt absorbed the afternoon rays as he strolled slowly on the sidewalk near the red brick church.” The stories present many compelling get-rich-quick scenarios, but they generally eschew the darker aspects of human nature, such as greed and treachery, and almost always find their ways to quick, easy endings. The essays are about more abstract types of treasure (including the spiritual kind) and, as such, don’t fit perfectly with the fiction. The book is highly readable, nonetheless, and most readers will likely find something to enjoy here—particularly if their dispositions are as sunny as the author’s seems to be.

A set of cheerful works about searching for gold of all kinds.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 196

Publisher: Kurti Publishing

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

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

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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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