NO BOARDING PASSES FOR FLIES

Name: NO BOARDING PASSES FOR FLIES
Author: Jenny Guest
ISBN: 978-1466200715

by Jenny Guest ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2012

A well-constructed family chronicle that floats above the events of its characters’ lives instead of diving into their...

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A young piano prodigy perseveres toward success despite the dysfunctional events of her childhood.

Guest’s debut novel follows the complex social interactions among three generations of a well-off American family. As a toddler, preternaturally mature Sophie becomes a confidante to her father and a mother to her baby sister, Chloe; Sophie’s mother, Clara, is too selfish and incompetent to handle either role. Sophie also secretly deals with two incidents of sexual abuse, which, as she becomes older, cause her to avoid romance and instead throw herself into virtuosic piano playing. Clara disappears for a few years, then returns home to complete the downward spiral after a family tragedy. Sophie’s grandparents on both sides step in to help. Julia, Sophie’s maternal grandmother and an aspiring writer, soon plays a major role in her granddaughter’s life. Sophie’s cousin, Rita, who pursues a more conventional life as a teen, provides an obvious contrast to the charming but isolated Sophie. Guest balances her large cast list with grace, keeping the connections clear and the individual personalities distinct even while failing to choose a strong point-of-view character. The narrative voice is strangely distant, as if someone is sharing the news of the family in well-composed letters meant to be read at leisure, rather than as full-on immersion in the characters’ world. Though the decades-spanning tale focuses on depicting the interactions of strong personalities, the presentation of emotion suffers from telling rather than showing: “It was a very emotional reunion. They were all ashamed and sad for not having much contact with their parents for such a long time.” The author’s foreword states that “neither time nor place are of any consequence”; nevertheless, the novel would benefit from a deeper grounding in the historical context and detail of its vague mid-century American setting, and it might work well explicitly reworked as a period piece.

A well-constructed family chronicle that floats above the events of its characters’ lives instead of diving into their emotional realities.

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2012

ISBN: 978-1466200715

Page Count: 242

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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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.