Readers may find the machine-gun staccato of nonstop sentence fragments and improbabilities distracting, but Higgins’...
Higgins (A Soldier’s Book, 1998, etc.) takes a fictional look at a real-life case and the effect it has on one family.
Karen and Ben live the perfect life: He is a pediatrician who has moved his practice to sun-kissed Hawaii with his second wife and the mother of three daughters, two from Karen’s ill-fated first marriage and one between them. But the two have a dark secret that is about to be played out in front of a jury in a small Michigan town, and that story will have a devastating effect on the entire family. This evocative tale opens with Ben’s arrest and quick removal from his home in Hawaii to the small town where he and Karen’s first husband, Pete, once went together to shoot skeet. But Pete ended up dead and Ben claimed it was all an accident. Pete’s parents couldn’t let go and they pushed until the case was reopened and Ben was arrested and charged with their son’s murder. Pete’s two daughters, Laura and Lin, now grown, show up for the trial and, in listening to their adopted father’s shifting versions of how their birth father died, they start questioning everything their lives have meant up until this point. Higgins’ tale is gracefully unwound, but so much of her story does not ring true that it’s distracting: There is no extradition hearing, their mother is provided an airline ticket to tag along with her indicted husband, Laura hits a grown deer and suffocates it with a plastic bag and some minor characters are brought into play for reasons that are never made clear. Higgins’ style, which is littered with sentence fragments, makes for some wearisome, albeit skillful, storytelling. In the long run, the story of the splintering and reuniting of a family in crisis redeems the author’s earlier silliness.
Readers may find the machine-gun staccato of nonstop sentence fragments and improbabilities distracting, but Higgins’ otherwise lovely writing will keep them reading to find out how this tale of love gone wrong ends.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57962-212-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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