A well-crafted, if not groundbreaking, tale about a gay teen in the Midwest.
A debut novel introduces a gay teenager coming-of-age in 1970s Detroit.
Jamie Goldberg’s mother takes him out of school to attend protests and single-handedly forces his district’s desegregation (which makes him something of a pariah). His father ignores him in favor of watching Detroit Tigers games on TV. As Jamie’s sexuality develops, he’s filled with an unshakable sense of guilt. He knows he should be attracted to the women in the Playboy that his brother gives him, but he can’t help but fantasize about a male classmate instead. Jamie hopes to talk to his older cousin Harold about these feelings (he has intimated that he might be the same way). But then Harold dies tragically of a heroin overdose. Jamie finds solace in Hesse, Nietzsche, and the operas of Wagner. “The music was also obscenely sensual to me,” he writes of Tannhäuser. “Ecstatic thoughts could freely float in and out of my mind, unattached to anyone or anything. The music had no gender.” After a stranger takes his virginity at age 15, Jamie realizes he has crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. While he wishes to escape to New York and a new life, he is forced by circumstances to remain in Detroit for college. Even so, college provides him an avenue to explore all the things he’s spent his adolescence hoping for (and fearing): music, theater, love, community—and a world where, to many people, he is a pervert. Can Jamie ever overcome his guilt, silence his fears, and find happiness in a life so different from the one he was raised to expect? In his series opener, Taylor tells the story from Jamie’s perspective in a polished prose enlivened with the protagonist’s neurotic humor: “He couldn’t reach his pen so I shot out of my chair and tried to pick it up. I accidentally knocked it away. I chased after it, picked it up, and handed the pen back to him. I plopped back down in my chair, hoping he’d forget the whole thing.” Jamie is thoughtful and highly sympathetic, and readers will be happy to follow him through the formative years of his youth. Taylor succeeds in capturing various moments (however painful or awkward) and revealing their importance. The author manages to illustrate the time and place of the novel with sharply selected details, contextualizing Jamie’s development in surprising ways. But when readers consider the Proustian task Taylor has set out for himself—this 450-page book only gets Jamie through age 20, and more volumes will follow—they may begin to wonder if the topic is truly fertile enough for the scope of the project. Despite the wit and charm that the author brings to this bildungsroman, it’s difficult to say that it contains anything that hasn’t already been covered extensively in fiction (often in fewer pages). The prospect of future, similarly verbose works devoted to Jamie might not fill readers with the same enthusiasm that clearly motivates Taylor.
A well-crafted, if not groundbreaking, tale about a gay teen in the Midwest.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 462
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2018
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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