An impressive launch of what has the potential to be an exemplary tale about a runaway.
A debut offers the beginning of a novel in serial form, following a teenage girl fleeing her abusive home in 1980s Louisiana.
A missing poster boasts $10,000, presumably a reward for information to help find 18-year-old Missi Piessy. But the young lady with a “puppy face” carrying a high school gym bag calls herself Bridget. Coming from Boottown, Baton Rouge, a week before Christmas in 1983, Bridget rides the trolley in New Orleans, getting off at 2nd Chance Clothing. Owner Hilma Burtte can see the reticent girl is hiding something—or possibly running away, her temple sporting a pronounced bruise. Bridget, careful not to say too much to Hilma or her daughter Clair Wildes, buys a wool coat and turns down the owner’s offer of money or a part-time job. Bridget later splurges on a catfish po’ boy but eventually makes her way to a homeless shelter. There, she meets volunteer Marvin, who may have sinister motives, trying to convince Bridget the shelter won’t take her right away and suggesting she stay at his place. The novel’s first volume ends with a short but ominous flashback to the day before. As her drunk mother sleeps, Bridget packs her bag with essentials, including a switchblade, preparing for an uncertain future. The author sets the story’s tone immediately, opening with the photo of a girl in pigtails. Details, of course, are sparse, but it’s evident that Bridget’s escaping her mother, at one point recalling Mom screaming for her glass. Bridget, too, is savvy, not readily fooled by Marvin, even suspecting he’s recited his spiel to other girls. Despite the volume’s relatively short length, Honest manages nuance, providing a back story for Hilma, who decades ago worked at a brothel, the Cherry. Dialogue is the phonetic rendering of the New Orleans dialect Yat; readers may have to read a few lines aloud, but it’s perfectly clear, for example, what “Dank ya” is. At the same time, the narrative’s prose is often foreboding, like Madam Selma White aiming a pistol at a belligerent client: “Her eyes focused on his entirety, wary of sudden movements while her index waited by the trigger.”
An impressive launch of what has the potential to be an exemplary tale about a runaway.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 16
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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