White (Sea Change, 2012, etc.) re-polishes her 2003 publication to good effect. This charming romance brims with appealing...
By the light of a crescent moon, Suzanne Paris spies through her bus window a opossum. Her eyes riveted, she wonders if the creature, like her, will simply wait for the next catastrophe. Or could she, for once, stop hiding.
Abruptly, Suzanne gets off the Atlanta-bound bus to find herself in Walton, Ga. There’s no better place to hide than this rural town. No one, not even her frightening ex-fiance, will find her here. Yet, everyone she meets wants to know where she’s from and where she got the unusual charm around her neck. Walton turns out to be populated with warm characters who have no intention of letting her slip under the radar. There’s Miss Lena, who seems to recognize Suzanne, even though Suzanne’s rough childhood, bouncing between foster homes and an alcoholic mother, never brought her to Walton. There’s Lucinda, who seems to recognize Suzanne’s wariness and hires her to help with her lingerie store. Most importantly, there’s Joe, Lucinda’s widowed nephew-in-law. Father of six, high school teacher, football coach, incumbent mayor—Joe seems impossibly good. A woman with secrets, Suzanne seems like a walking bad decision. Luckily, Joe’s eldest daughter, Maddie, begins to connect the two destined lovers. Like Suzanne, Maddie lost her mother at 14 and has a talent for photography. Soon, Suzanne is tutoring Maddie, baby-sitting Joe’s younger kids and becoming inextricably woven into the fabric of his life. Enter the villain: Stinky Harden, Joe’s competition in the mayoral race and Suzanne’s nemesis as he determines to discover her secret and use it to discredit Joe. Soon, Suzanne’s past threatens her future, and only love—and some rather wicked trickery—can save the day.
White (Sea Change, 2012, etc.) re-polishes her 2003 publication to good effect. This charming romance brims with appealing characters and captivating phrasing.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-23968-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL Accent/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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