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RACHAEL'S RETURN

An artful emotional drama undermined by overly familiar self-help tropes.

A supernatural novel follows the attempt of an unborn soul to find a path to reincarnation. 

Caroline Martin is 45 years old, and in preparation for life after full-time motherhood—her youngest son has just graduated from high school—she plans to have a hysterectomy. But she’s overwhelmed by sadness and doubt, becoming slow to accept that she’ll never have another child. What she doesn’t know is that she’s actually pregnant— Fiona Carlisle, a nurse, inadvertently mixed up her medical records with those of another hospital patient. Meanwhile, Mary Anne Maynard struggles to survive as she brings her own baby to term after she’s savagely beaten and then shot by her chronically abusive boyfriend, Vito Gamboa. Hovering above the earthly drama is a disembodied old soul—rendered spiritually advanced after numerous reincarnations—looking for an opportunity to be reborn. That soul has a long-standing and profound connection to Caroline and pines to be born as her child, risking grave consequences by delaying a commitment to another host. Overseeing this crisis are two spiritual guides—Thor and Aurora—intervening in myriad subtle ways to help the soul safely find a suitable home. Mary Anne manages to give birth to a healthy baby girl and names her Rachael on Caroline’s suggestion—the two briefly share a hospital room. But Vito is still on the loose and can’t bear the thought of “anyone other than himself getting custody of his own daughter.” His implacable rage ultimately forces Mary Anne’s and Caroline’s lives to fatefully collide yet again. Rebhan (Finding Tranquility Base, 2012) skillfully braids several plotlines into a coherent fabric. In addition, her writing is reliably clear, if mottled with shopworn New Age clichés: “She felt an immense presence of love and peace and felt drawn into the light.” There’s no shortage of high drama in this relatively brief novel as well as plenty of climactic violence for a story driven by otherworldly preoccupations. Problematically, the tale seems designed to impart a spiritual lesson of some kind—the plot reads like a self-consciously styled parable. But it’s never clear what the lesson is precisely given the vague talk of “higher selves” and “higher dimensions.”

An artful emotional drama undermined by overly familiar self-help tropes.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63152-868-2

Page Count: 280

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2020

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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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