by Jonathan Carroll ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 1993
Carroll joins the mainstream with a romantic suspense novel quite unlike his usual slippery surrealism (Outside the Dog Museum, 1991; A Child Across the Sky, 1990, etc.) and delivers what is pretty much a winner. Carroll's US cult following is limited, but his work is heralded and esteemed in Europe for its avant-garde qualities (he lives in Vienna). What carries the day for him here are characters that really grip you, and straightahead storytelling that should bring him a new batch of stateside readers. His hero is Max Fischer (perhaps a play on Hollywood animator Max Fleischer), a famed L.A. cartoonist whose main character is Paper Clip, a talking paper clip that makes eccentric comments about the realistic parts of his panels. Unmarried at 37, Max falls for Lily Aaron, a widow with a bright nine-year-old son, Lincoln. Lily loves waitressing in an oddball L.A. restaurant, and her dead-on honesty attracts Max, who finally marries her. But he finds that her honesty has its hidden neurotic side, which prompts him to hire a friendly female detective to look into Lily's background. The results lead to very upsetting facts: Lily not only was never married, and has invented her dead ex-husband, but she also kidnapped Lincoln as a small baby and has raised him as her own. Why? Because an early miscarriage left her unable to bear children, although not infertile. Max flies to New Jersey and meets (he thinks) Lincoln's lost parents, but decides to go along with Lily and keep Lincoln as his stepson. Years pass and wonderful, brilliant Lincoln grows into a jackbooted psychotic who hates Max and Lily and is ready to kill.... Strong throughout, though the story's hairpinning into suspense feels forced. Still, honest Lily's best pages run deep— and this is Carroll's most readable ever.
Pub Date: April 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-41974-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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.
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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