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You're Still Sick?

Name: You're Still Sick?
Author: Julie Jacobsen Deck

by Julie Jacobsen Deck ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A sometimes-exhausting but realistic portrait of life under physical duress.

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A young woman with chronic illness takes matters into her own hands in this debut novel.

Adrea “Drea” Ragnason can’t find a doctor who understands her. Her symptoms, from fatigue to baldness to acne to fainting spells, have come to define her. Her latest physician, Dr. Natsker, has the same dismissive bedside manner as other doctors Drea’s seen: one thinks she’s fainting because of stress from her final exams, while another believes that she just needs to exercise more. Luckily, her aunt, Betty, with whom she works at a bus station ticket booth, is sympathetic and compassionate, though Drea’s mother, Iris, is well-meaning but irritating. One morning Drea decides that the solution to her problems is to visualize her doctors as suffering from the same symptoms she has, and she does so in her journal. Meanwhile, Dr. Helene Gundersen, a talented psychologist, has just opened her own practice in a sunny, welcoming cottage; soon, some of her patients complain of terrible health issues. Betty helps Drea find an apartment above a flower shop owned by Otto, a widower who encourages her to continue to be more vocal with her doctors. When the opportunity comes for Drea to move into Otto’s house and help him open a plant nursery, she’s happy to do so. But she continues to have fainting spells and fatigue and demands to be tested for polycystic ovary syndrome. It’s revealed that some of Dr. Gundersen’s patients are also Drea’s doctors, and they come to realize that their lack of empathy for their patients is humiliating and frustrating when the tables are turned. Overall, this novel could have used more nuance, which might have elevated the novel from a litany of woes to a true exploration of empathy. It also takes a while for Dr. Gundersen’s role in the novel to become clear, and the epiphanies that her patients have are often heavy-handed. That said, the story does an excellent job of portraying the relentless difficulties of suffering from hard-to-treat, chronic illnesses. The characters that love Drea despite her issues are a welcome contrast to the self-pity that sometimes colors other chapters. Deck also considers Drea’s plight from several angles, including how it may be affected by gender bias. Although the novel ends abruptly, its message of self-advocacy and love is palpable.

A sometimes-exhausting but realistic portrait of life under physical duress.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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.

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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.