Osborn's (The Paper Chase, 2004, etc.) fly-on-the-wall approach offers a certain voyeuristic pleasure but seems primarily...
Nine months in marriage counseling with a 30-something California couple.
"This isn't a marriage where someone is beating the other one up. Or where someone is gambling away everything the family owns, or someone can't hold a job because they're drunk or high. As a matter of fact, this is a marriage that, in material terms, has been very successful." Nonetheless, Steve, a boyishly handsome, successful partner at a private equity firm, has been cheating on Gretchen, “a beautiful, smart ice princess" and a tenured English professor. By the time the two arrive in therapy with a counselor named Sandy, Gretchen has already begun her own affair, rented an apartment, taken the kids and moved out. In dialogue-heavy chapters set entirely in Sandy's office, narrated from her therapeutic point of view, their troubles and habitual communication problems are revealed, diagnosed, and discussed at length. "I want you to try an exercise," Sandy tells Steve. "When Gretchen says something, I want you to imagine she means the opposite of what she is saying." While Gretchen perceives Sandy as siding with Steve, who really just wants to be forgiven and get back together, Sandy explains that she sides with the marriage, as personified by an empty green chair that doesn't match anything else in the office. "I keep that chair in the office to remind me that I speak for the marriage," Sandy tells Gretchen. "Sandy, you are sounding delusional," Gretchen replies. "You're going to tell me what my nonexistent marriage is saying from a chair it isn't in?" Will Sandy's methods work? Will Steve and Gretchen give up their extramarital liaisons and reconnect with their love? What is that chair really saying?
Osborn's (The Paper Chase, 2004, etc.) fly-on-the-wall approach offers a certain voyeuristic pleasure but seems primarily designed for didactic effect.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-19202-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
IN THE NEWS
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.
After facing tragedy and betrayal in New York, an aspiring fashion designer escapes to her idyllic Pacific coast hometown to raise her best friend’s two young children and finds inspiration, redemption, and love in the unexpected journey.
Caroline Shelby always dreamed of leaving tiny Oysterville, Washington, and becoming a couturier. After years of toil, she finally has a big break only to discover a famous designer has stolen her launch line. When she accuses him, he blackballs her, so she’s already struggling when her best friend, Angelique, a renowned model from Haiti whose work visa has expired, shows up on her doorstep with her two biracial children, running from an abusive partner she won’t identify. When Angelique dies of a drug overdose, Caroline takes custody of the kids and flees back to her hometown. She reconnects with her sprawling family and with Will and Sierra Jensen, who were once her best friends, though their relationships have grown more complicated since Will and Sierra married. Caroline feels guilty that she didn’t realize Angelique was abused and tries to make a difference when she discovers that people she knows in Oysterville are also victims of domestic violence. She creates a support group that becomes a welcome source of professional assistance when some designs she works on for the kids garner local interest that grows regional, then national. Meanwhile, restless Sierra pursues her own dreams, leading to Will and Caroline’s exploring some unresolved feelings. Wiggs’ latest is part revenge fantasy and part romantic fairy tale, and while some details feel too smooth—how fortunate that every person in the circle has some helpful occupation that benefits Caroline's business—Caroline has a challenging road, and she rises to it with compassion and resilience. Timelines alternating among the present and past, both recent and long ago, add tension and depth to a complex narrative that touches on the abuse of power toward women and the extra-high stakes when the women involved are undocumented. Finally, Wiggs writes about the children’s race and immigration status with a soft touch that feels natural and easygoing but that might seem unrealistic to some readers.
A lovely read—entertaining, poignant, and meaningful.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-242558-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in...
This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.
It’s not for nothing that Ng (Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You, Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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