A darkly enthralling tale that highlights Peet as a writer to watch.
A small-town Midwestern community suffers and seeks salvation in Peet’s debut novel.
The story opens in Jackass Flats, a dead-end section of Hawthorn, Missouri. The neighborhood has a checkered past; not long after its founding, the pastor’s wife was found shot between the eyes, and Pastor Stephen Shrine was hanged by members of the Ku Klux Klan. For generations, the residents bore the weight of this brutal legacy. Currently, the Haights are the only African-American family in Jackass Flats. The racial tension is palpable, and 9-year-old Terrence Haight has already developed an “internal strength” and an “involuntary hardness.” As he grows older, he develops a love of music, and after leaving the Army, he attends college in the hope of becoming a music teacher. His hopes are realized in Hawthorn only to be suddenly dashed when he’s accused of having an affair with a white student. Meanwhile, Father Redmond, the current pastor of Hawthorn Baptist Church, positions himself as the one man who can hold the community together—but he seems far closer to the devil than to the God he purports to serve. The novel follows the lives of a range of other disparate characters, including Eric, the pastor’s son—a young boy with a grudge and a psychotic streak—and Daniel, the son of Terrence’s former student, who seems cast adrift in a tempestuous world. Peet gives readers the uncanny sense that they’re looking down on a strange, ungodly place: “Hawthorn and Dogwood trees gave it a lovely appearance from Heaven, but perhaps not from the ground, where you could see it up close.” One can draw parallels between this book’s dark opening and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), as both capture a world inside a vacuum. As with Steinbeck, readers will become deeply engaged in the characters’ clumsy navigations through life, hoping that redemption or reparation will follow. Peet is a skilled writer who offers succinct and unique turns of phrase: “The wrinkles of Jim Crow hadn’t yet been fully ironed out in that part of the country.” Overall, he delivers a masterful debut that moves provocatively between a nightmare and grim reality.
A darkly enthralling tale that highlights Peet as a writer to watch.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Persimmon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
