A unique and over-the-top look at modern motherhood, full of funny and cringeworthy moments.
A mom tries—and spectacularly fails—to fit into her new picture-perfect town.
When Holly Banks moves to the Village of Primm, she hopes it will be the start of a new adventure for her family. With its wonderful school system, immaculately tended lawns, and superinvolved parents, Primm couldn’t be anything less than perfect. However, aspiring-filmmaker Holly soon realizes that the town bears a slightly creepy resemblance to Stepford (of the famous wives), and no one appreciates her minor failures to live up to the status quo—like, for example, showing up to kindergarten drop-off while wearing pajamas or accidentally hitting a school bus in her attempts to move her car. Holly quickly finds a nemesis in PTA president Mary-Margaret St. James, a bizarrely Primm-obsessed mom who talks about herself in the third person and won’t let Holly leave the premises without volunteering for something (and not just for napkin duty, because everyone knows only the slacker moms sign up to bring napkins). But Holly has other things to worry about—for starters, she thinks her husband might be having an affair, she constantly has to pay her mother’s gambling debts, and she’s feeling bored and restless after putting her filmmaking dreams aside. Holly starts making her own documentary using the subject matter in front of her but soon realizes that Primm's perfect veneer hides more than a few secrets. There are many novels about women struggling to fit into upper-class communities, but debut author Valerie manages to create a story that feels fresh, with sparkling dialogue that could have come from a weirder version of Gilmore Girls. Most of that is due to Holly’s voice, which is quirky without ever being annoying, and the cast of wacky side characters who are satirical while still feeling like real human beings. There are even several laugh-out-loud moments, most of them revolving around the bug infestation destroying the town’s prized topiaries, a privileged problem that highlights just how hilariously ridiculous the Village of Primm is.
A unique and over-the-top look at modern motherhood, full of funny and cringeworthy moments.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1406-9
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga—it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society....
An island off the coast of Maine: Let's buy it, dear.
"Handsome, tanned, Kitty and Ogden Milton stood ramrod straight and smiling into the camera on the afternoon in 1936 when they had chartered a sloop, sailed out into Penobscot Bay, and bought Crockett's Island." This photo is clipped to a clothesline in the office of professor Evie Milton in the history department at NYU; she found it while cleaning out her mother's apartment after her death. "Since the afternoon in the photograph, four generations of her family had eaten round the table on Crockett's Island, clinked the same glasses, fallen between the same sheets, and heard the foghorn night after night." Evie jokes with an African-American colleague that the photograph represents "the Twilight of the WASPs," then finds herself snappishly defending them. Blake's (The Postmistress, 2010, etc.) third novel studies the unfolding of several storylines over the generations of this family: deaths and losses shrouded in secrecy, terrible errors in judgment, thwarted love—much of it related to or caused by the family's attitudes toward blacks and Jews. While patriarch Ogden Milton presided unflinchingly over his firm's involvement with the Nazis, his granddaughter Evie Milton is married to a Jewish man—who, like any person of his background who has visited Crockett's Island, complains that there's not a comfortable chair in the place. Kitty Milton, the matriarch, twisted by social mores into repressing her tragedies and ignoring her conscience, is a fascinating character, appealing in some ways, pitiable and repugnant in others. Through Kitty and her daughters, Blake renders the details of anti-Semitic prejudice as felt by this particular type of person. Reminiscent of the novels of Julia Glass, the story of the Miltons engages not just with history and politics, but with the poetry of the physical world. "The year wheeled round on its colors. Summer's full green spun to gold then slipping gray and resting, resting white at the bottom of the year...then one day the green whisper, the lightest green, soft and growing into the next day...suddenly, impossibly, it was spring again."
This novel sets out to be more than a juicy family saga—it aims to depict the moral evolution of a part of American society. Its convincing characters and muscular narrative succeed on both counts.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11025-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
A cheerful and heartwarming look at friendship, family, love, and new beginnings.
After arranging a monthlong Paris vacation with her husband of 25 years, Grace discovers he’s cheating on her and takes the trip on her own.
Grace’s complicated childhood made her determined to carve out a picture-perfect life through organization and order. She loves being a happily married part-time French teacher with a college-bound daughter. So it’s a shock when, on Valentine’s Day, Grace shares her 25th wedding-anniversary surprise—a monthlong summer trip to Paris—and her husband David’s response is to tell her he’s having an affair and wants a divorce. Devastated, she decides to take the trip herself. In Paris, Grace’s purse is snatched and Audrey, a dyslexic English teen who can barely speak French, saves it. Audrey is living and working in the Paris bookshop Grace’s grandmother asked her to visit, and Grace winds up helping her during her shifts and renting an apartment over the shop. Audrey prods Grace to let go a little, gives her a makeover, and encourages her to meet up with her first lover. Grace inspires Audrey to explore some of her own talents and offers calm, affectionate support to the younger woman, whose home life has always been fraught thanks to an alcoholic mother. When simultaneous family crises happen, Audrey and Grace lean on each other and offer empathy and insight that lead to new possibilities on a variety of fronts. Morgan’s (The Christmas Sisters, 2018, etc.) new novel is an imaginative and charming coming-of-age—and greeting-middle-age—story with a bit of a fairy-tale feel, especially given the Paris setting. A few details ask readers to suspend disbelief, but for the most part, the story and characters are delightful enough that they won’t mind.
A cheerful and heartwarming look at friendship, family, love, and new beginnings.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-50754-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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