Phillips’ prose is as haunting as the questions she raises about the natures of sin, evil and grace.
Phillips (Lark and Termite, 2009) fuses the established facts surrounding the 1931 trial of serial killer Harry Powers with her imagined version of the victims’ inner lives and the fictional lives of a handful of characters connected by the crimes.
Financially strapped since her husband’s death, Asta Eicher lives with her three children in a large suburban Chicago house, where she takes in boarders. Devoted to her and the children, former boarder Charles O’Boyle, who has prospered in his business, proposes to Asta while celebrating a joyful Christmas with the family in 1930. Aware he is gay, she turns him down. Instead, she assumes she will solve her problems by marrying Cornelius Pierson, with whom she’s secretly begun corresponding through the American Friendship Society (think snail-mail Match.com). In July 1931, Asta leaves her children with a babysitter while she travels with Cornelius to set up the family’s new home. A week later, Cornelius returns alone to fetch the kids. Phillips brings the Eichers to vivid life—Asta’s guilt, 14-year-old Grethe’s innocence, 12-year-old Hart’s protectiveness, 9-year-old Annabel’s spirit—and wisely eschews the grisly details of their deaths. Months later, the police discover the Eichers’ remains in the basement of a garage belonging to Harry Powers in Quiet Dell, W.V. Charged with the Eichers’ murders, Powers is indicted for the murder of Dorothy Lemke, whose body has also been discovered in the garage, because the circumstantial evidence in her case is stronger. The snippets of actual court testimony and reportage included are harrowing. While digging up dirt on Powers, (fictional) Chicago Tribune reporter Emily Thornhill falls deeply in love with Asta’s (real-life) banker. She also takes in an orphaned street urchin. So in the aftermath of one family’s destruction, Emily creates a new if unconventional “family” of people she loves.
Phillips’ prose is as haunting as the questions she raises about the natures of sin, evil and grace.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7253-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.
A wild child’s isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.
“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens (Secrets of the Savanna, 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial. By now the novel’s weaknesses have become apparent: the monochromatic characterization (good boy Tate, bad boy Chase) and implausibilities (Kya evolves into a polymath—a published writer, artist, and poet), yet the closing twist is perhaps its most memorable oddity.
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1909-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.
A Harvard freshman investigates the suicide of her schizophrenic brother and finds herself chasing a conspiracy and hearing the voices of the dead.
Cady Archer is determined to attend Harvard even though her beloved older brother, Eric, killed himself there. Considered a genius in math and science, Eric suffered from schizophrenia but had stopped taking his prescriptions, and his yearlong mental health spiral into paranoia and delusion still haunts Cady and her parents. Cady is attending Harvard against her mother’s wishes, but she’s driven by a need to understand what happened the night Eric died. Her quest leads her to a handsome, seductive friend of Eric’s, the professor with whom he was working on a secret project, and something more troubling: voices in her head. Is Cady suffering from schizophrenia, too? Or are the voices she’s hearing truly ghosts, real people who once lived on the Harvard campus and faced their own dilemmas there? The question of Cady’s mental health is interesting, and Serritella—best known for the essay collections she writes with her mother, thriller writer Lisa Scottoline (I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses, 2018, etc.)—brings the famous campus to life in a vivid way. She also effectively explores the aftermath of loss and grief on a family. But Serritella is on shaky ground once the story veers into the supernatural. Cady’s conversations with the ghosts are tiresome and ultimately don’t add much to the narrative. In fact, they detract from what could have been a solid psychological thriller. Her conversations with Bilhah, a slave who is terrified her son will be sold away from her, feel uncomfortably like pandering. The book is repetitive and far too long, and though the endgame strives to shock readers with twists, it's ultimately unsatisfying.
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51036-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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