A helicopter mom turns out to be no match for a well-funded conspiracy; engaging, with a likable young protagonist.
A sinister secret lies behind the pristine facade of an elite New Hampshire boarding school in this novel.
Welcome to Dunning Academy, where today’s best young minds and upper-crust legacies are molded into tomorrow’s movers and shakers—if the academic and social pressures don’t break them first. When 14-year-old Sam Webber received his acceptance, his mother, Hannah, was overjoyed. Sam was the miracle baby she and her husband, Edward, thought they would never have, and from the moment of his birth, he became the center of his mother’s life. Dunning was her idea—Sam would receive a superior education and make the important connections that would lead to a successful life. But now, he is on his own, insecure and struggling (“He realized something during those first weeks it would take his mother a long time to understand: the only way he was going to master Dunning Academy would be through a side door”). That door is provided by Justin Crandall, a legacy golden boy, who befriends Sam and offers him a chance to join The Nine, Dunning’s secret society (think Yale’s Skull and Bones for the high school set). Gradually, as he is pulled more deeply into The Nine’s web, Sam comes to realize that the society’s ostensibly harmless pranks are being manipulated by others with malevolent agendas. Woven throughout the disturbing, plot-driven narrative is a poignant mother-son drama, with Hannah’s obsessive commitment to Sam’s Ivy League track causing a fracturing in their relationship. In fluid prose, Blasberg (Eden, 2017) combines two tales through two alternating voices. The third-person narrator provides the major storyline, in which decades-old misdeeds are resurrected through current schemes and blackmail, while Hannah delivers the subplot through first-person, emotional recollections. While Sam is an appealing lead character, readers will likely find Hannah’s intransigence frustrating. But ultimately, she faces the fact that her own ambitions for Sam left him vulnerable to the machinations of more experienced players: “I used to take it for granted that our desires were intertwined. I assumed he’d absorbed them in utero, just as he shared my blood and my oxygen.”
A helicopter mom turns out to be no match for a well-funded conspiracy; engaging, with a likable young protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-674-9
Page Count: 325
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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