A strange and frustratingly far-fetched story.
In Anker’s series starter, the fates of two families collide in South Dakota.
Ramsey Wade’s parents died in 1974, when he was 4 years old, and ever since, he’s lived a nomadic existence, governed by his brother Carl, who’s 11 years his senior. Carl is brilliant—he reads and writes constantly, has some kind of publishing career, and speaks multiple languages—and he’s acted as a tutor to Ramsey, who’s never attended school. Ramsey is also an intellectual prodigy—advanced beyond his years in most academic subjects and virtuosic with a violin. However, Carl is mentally ill; he slips without warning from one distinct personality to another, including some that are brutally violent. Ramsey has a hard time adjusting to school life, as his genius alienates him from others, as does his lack of mundane experience—a point that Anker (Brothers, Part III—Spring, 2018, etc.) doggedly hammers home. (At 14 years old, for example, Ramsey has never encountered spaghetti.) In orchestra class, Ramsey befriends Jeff Lofton, whose family circumstances are implausibly similar to Ramsey’s: He was raised by his older brother, John, in the aftermath of his own parents’ premature deaths. Jeff is also something of a social outcast—talented but socially clumsy. The two quickly become friends, and Ramsey finds it increasingly difficult to conceal signs of abuse and neglect as Carl spirals deeper into madness. Anker’s tale has the feel of a fairy tale for teens: imaginatively inventive and dramatic but squarely implausible. She ably braids multiple storylines and a considerable cast of characters into a single, novelistic tapestry, and there’s hardly a lull in the fast-paced plot. However, it’s never clear who the intended audience is; the principal themes can be disquietingly grim, while the lightweight prose seems directed to readers in their early teens. Also, the story expresses a peculiar fascination with corporal punishment; John frequently spanks his teenage brothers, and the school’s vice principal does so to students, as well. In what American high school does an administrator physically discipline students in this day and age?
A strange and frustratingly far-fetched story.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979737-56-2
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 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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