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THE PROMISE SEED

Name: THE PROMISE SEED
Author: Jody Glittenberg

SAVING MOTHER EARTH

by Jody Glittenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

An overly simplistic moralism weakens this multigenerational novel.

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Glittenberg’s (Land, Love, Life, 2016, etc.) historical family saga follows the fortunes of homesteaders on the northeastern Colorado prairie and their descendants.

After a short flashback set in 1983, this novel begins in the spring of 1909 in Hopetown, Colorado. John William Schultz and his cousin Gus arrive there from Iowa ahead of their families to take up their new claims. They turn out to have different attitudes about them: Gus regards the land as infinitely exploitable, refusing to let any lie fallow, while John protects the land and his seed crop, preserving the best from one generation to the next in a sturdy box that he calls “The Promise Seed.” Prairie dangers such as drought, grasshoppers, fire, and rattlesnakes threaten the homesteaders and sometimes bring tragedy. After losing a child, Gus eventually sells out and returns east, but restoring the land that he ruined takes a decade. The cousins’ dichotomy lives on in John William’s sons: Will is a good farmer, but Hank is, like Gus, selfish and dishonest. Their fortunes diverge during the hard Depression years as Will and family work hard, even becoming migrant fruit pickers for a time, and Hank prospers, often through cheating. After World War II, though, prospects for Will and his family change. Glittenberg tells a moralistic story of white hats and black hats, and one can practically hear the mustache-twirling when Gus, for example, says his ambition is “to own more than anyone else.” Meanwhile, the heroic characters are faultlessly humble, honest, hardworking, and loving, and also welcoming of new ideas, such as organic farming. The cliché of Native Americans being especially spiritual is often emphasized; a half-Cheyenne man who wishes “to be more Indian than white” is not just “a special messenger” or maybe “an angel”—he can actually work miracles. The prose style, rife with dashes, is also irritating at times, as are moments of naïve exposition: “she had pneumonia (with drama in her voice).” However, the nitty-gritty details of the homesteaders’ hard lives add some interest to the tale, such as when Papa Paul, John’s father-in-law, inspects seeds to find the best ones: “Papa held fistfuls of seeds, examining each grain, looking for striations and markers. Then he bit into the seed, ‘Look this is a good example of a possible puny seed.’ He showed it around to all the farmers.”

An overly simplistic moralism weakens this multigenerational novel.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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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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- SEEN & HEARD
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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.