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ALTERNATIVE REMEDIES FOR LOSS

Name: ALTERNATIVE REMEDIES FOR LOSS
Author: Joanna Cantor
ISBN: 978-1-63557-171-4

by Joanna Cantor ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2018

There’s no shortage of wrenching writing about the loss of a mother, but this novel fails to hit memorable heights.

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Unmoored by her mother’s death, a young woman finds herself making questionable decisions, processing new information about the past, and reaching toward a more enlightened future.

There’s a punchy moment on Page 4 of Cantor’s debut when Olivia Harris, 22 and working a lowly job at a Manhattan film production company, goes home with a not-especially-attractive client and finds herself charging him $1,000 for sex. But Olivia, who grew up comfortably in Westchester County and has nearly finished her degree at Vassar, is no kind of sex worker; instead she’s a grieving daughter whose mother succumbed to a brain tumor a few months earlier. For much of this cool tale, Olivia maintains her unpredictable and borderline sympathetic stance, whether taking up with another, possibly abusive client; resisting any gesture of kindness from—or toward—her father’s new companion; or taking the support of parent, friends, and siblings for granted. But Olivia is working through her pain and loss and also following the trail of some mysterious correspondence in her mother’s effects which leads her into the world of yoga and later to an Indian ashram. In between these minimal events, the novel spends a great deal of time hanging out with Olivia—in bars, with her friend Kelsey, with family members, work colleagues, ashram acquaintances, passing lovers. Cantor acknowledges Olivia’s mixed emotions—anger, sadness, confusion—yet translates them into a slowly paced, numbly expressed sequence of jumpy choices. A coda follows, which perhaps sees the dawning of some maturity, although it’s accompanied by Olivia’s unacknowledged acceptance of another round of easy opportunities.

There’s no shortage of wrenching writing about the loss of a mother, but this novel fails to hit memorable heights.

Pub Date: May 8, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63557-171-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

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.