The novel succeeds as both a disquieting tale of ordinary horror and a portrait of a marriage at a tipping point.
Over 24 increasingly suspenseful hours, a family’s suburban life unravels.
A tense domestic drama, Kitses’ first novel alternates between the points of view of a husband and wife torn apart by what they don’t tell each other. Tom and Helen have moved from Queens to a small town 90 minutes up the Hudson River with their twin 3-year-old daughters, but their life isn’t as bucolic as they had hoped it would be. Though they’re both working hard—Tom at a news wire service and Helen as a freelance graphic designer—they’re having trouble making ends meet, and the town for which they had high hopes turns out to have a seamy underside. As the day goes on, full of frictions major and minor, both husband and wife come close to reaching the breaking point. Tom finds himself in a confrontation with an old lover with whom he has a complicated relationship, while Helen, already simmering with anger, finds herself taking out her feelings on a pair of teenagers she meets in a park, with unfortunate results. Leavened with occasional humor, particularly directed toward the wire service, the novel gradually and inexorably ratchets up its suspense, with each tiny choice that one of the characters makes spiraling out into a path of destructive behavior. Even as the consequences of these choices grow more severe, Kitses keeps them believable so that the reader’s increasing dread can’t be easily dismissed. The author anchors the family’s story in a larger contemporary social reality, in which the actions of the couple are shaped not just by their emotions, but by the “blighted, postindustrial” town where the value of their house is constantly declining, the fact that both Helen and Tom have been edged out of steady jobs into marginal work, and the lack of affordable child care.
The novel succeeds as both a disquieting tale of ordinary horror and a portrait of a marriage at a tipping point.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9852-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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