An engaging tale about the importance of allowing friendships to evolve.
After her best friend gets married, a 28-year-old woman must reevaluate her own life in this novel.
Romy Belkin and Pia Zimble have been best friends since the ninth grade. After attending the same college, they found an apartment to share in Brooklyn, where they’ve been cohabiting happily ever since. They enjoy their nightly routines together so much that neither one minds her dead-end job, working as what Romy calls “urban menials.” After Romy, who loves to cook, makes shirred eggs, Pia suggests that she do it again for a video. But Romy decides to teach her friend the custom recipe and record her efforts. They eventually post the video starring Pia on YouTube. Before long, they are regularly posting instructional videos where Pia pretends she is the chef and sole mastermind behind the recipes. To their great surprise, Pia begins to develop a following. Romy is happy to remain in the shadows and allow Pia the spotlight, even after they are approached for a cookbook deal. They are earning enough to quit their day jobs, and they’re having a blast. Unfortunately, their fledgling business hits a stumbling block when Pia meets Nicolo Gia and gets engaged in what feels like a hot second. The couple is married before Romy can blink, and she’s suddenly struggling to fill the gaping hole left by Pia’s absence. Romy develops a couple of unlikely friendships and embarks on a string of one-night stands, threatening to self-destruct in grief over the recent distance from her best pal. Full of wonderful sensory details about food and methods of cooking, the narrative voice sizzles with passion and reverence for flavor and spice. Told in the first person by Romy, Deborah’s (Rosalind, 2019, etc.) novel reads at many points like nonfiction, creating the impression that at least a portion of the tale is autobiographical. As the plotline moves further away from food, additional themes begin to take center stage, like self-confidence, romance, and self-determination. The author also sheds light on some of the difficulties inherent in finally growing up, including loneliness and self-doubt. Told in a plot-focused, accessible prose, the story deals artfully with many issues that pop up along the road to personal growth, including heartbreak, jealousy, and disappointment.
An engaging tale about the importance of allowing friendships to evolve.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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