For best results, read it on a dark and stormy night—in a well-lit room, far away from the water.
Sinister shadows abound in McMahon’s supernatural thriller about two sisters, a haunted pool, and a legacy of wishes and sacrifice.
As a child, Jackie was often overshadowed by her dazzling older sister. Everything seemed to come easier to Lexie—adventure, friendship, even the love of their family—until, as a teenager, she began to manifest symptoms of “schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar type.” The two girls continued to grow apart; Jackie escaped to the West Coast for college and career. Now their grandmother has died, leaving Lexie her house, Sparrow Crest. Jackie, a social worker, distances herself from her sister for her own mental health, so when Lexie leaves her several manic messages one evening, Jackie ignores the calls only to hear from her aunt the next morning that Lexie is dead, drowned in Sparrow Crest’s pool. Jackie flies back to Vermont and discovers that Lexie was documenting strange occurrences that seemed to center around the pool, which is fed by a mineral spring. Her research into the family history, as well as other deaths by drowning, sparks Jackie’s dread and interest, and she begins to look more deeply into the truth about their family, Sparrow Crest, and the pool that is the dark heart of it all. McMahon alternates chapters about Jackie with chapters about a woman named Ethel Monroe and her husband, Will, who stayed at the springs in 1929 when they were on the grounds of a swanky hotel and who made a secret wish. Like many, Ethel soon realizes that the springs offer both hope and tragedy, and her story becomes interwoven with Jackie’s investigations. McMahon has a gift for creating creepy atmosphere and letting spooky suggestions linger in the mind. She’s also adept at weaving legends and stories into the fabric of what feels like real life, because her characters are so believably vulnerable.
For best results, read it on a dark and stormy night—in a well-lit room, far away from the water.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9821-5392-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.
Time is fractured in this story of a woman’s life as a child, college student, and 20-something set against the development of the atomic bomb and efforts to land the first man on the moon.
When Annie Fisk was a child growing up in New Mexico, she had a best friend, Diana, who would appear and disappear in her backyard. A number of small trinkets appeared and disappeared in the same way. As Annie grew up, she decided her friend must have been imaginary, and she never told her mother or her father—a physicist working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—about it. After her father’s death and her graduation from high school, Annie headed to college in San Antonio, where she met and fell in love with Evelyn, a fellow college student with dreams of being a painter. But, drawn by an imaginary thread, Annie leaves Evelyn after graduation to move to Houston, with the goal of working for NASA. And she does—starting as a secretary, and then moving into programming. What begins as a straightforward story veers into science fiction territory almost unexpectedly as Annie discovers a wormhole and begins to research and test the implications of that finding with a colleague. Explorations of love, loss, science, and the edges of the universe and what is—and is not—possible in the space-time continuum collide in this story; it's reminiscent of the thoughtfulness, matter-of-fact science, and female strength of Connie Willis’ well-known time traveling series beginning with Doomsday Book (1992) as well as the world portrayed in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016).
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543887
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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