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THE WALKING STICK: Willow of the Wind

Name: THE WALKING STICK: Willow of the Wind
Author: Kathy Love Cowen

by Kathy Love Cowen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2017

An informative and often engaging portrayal of Oklahoma Cherokee life in a previous century.

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The Walkingstick and Wolf clans return in this second installment of Cowen’s (The Walking Stick: Chewahnih, 2016) mid-19th-century Cherokee family saga, this time featuring Chewahnih’s mother, Willow of the Wind; and her new husband, Snow Eagle.

The Civil War is hovering, and illegal slave traders have been committing atrocities within Oklahoma’s Cherokee Territory. Specifically, raiders have been stealing Native American women and trading them for black slaves transported from the Caribbean. Snow Eagle’s troublesome daughter, Golden Meadow, is taken by slave traders, and their Deer Clan (part of the Wolf Clan) embarks on a rescue mission, which expands to save other slaves. This adventurous plotline is supplemented by rarely taught historical details regarding slavery. But the bulk of the story revolves around the main characters’ family problems; for example, Meadow and Tahnie, Willow’s son, are resentful of their parents’ marriage—until Willow leads Meadow’s rescue and the stepsiblings fall in love. The bad guys are simply portrayed as evil incarnate, but most of the other characters are well-drawn and engaging, and they include a couple of unusual figures: Six Toes, a domesticated but sometimes-fierce bobcat that Willow raised; and Angel, a fluffy, white wolf pup, given to Chewahnih as a wedding present by the wolf that protected her in the previous novel. Chewahnih’s and Willow’s abilities to communicate with animals add an enjoyable and occasionally humorous mystical element to Cowen’s skillful narrative, which mixes sometimes-violent history, Cherokee traditionalism, and the normal conflicts of extended families. However, it would have benefited from a stronger copy edit. An overuse of commas, for example, adds confusion rather than clarity, and dropped words (“ ‘We did. We will be going back to clear them out,’ Tahnie his throat and continued”) cause unnecessary distractions.

An informative and often engaging portrayal of Oklahoma Cherokee life in a previous century.

Pub Date: May 7, 2017

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 345

Publisher: Cats Paw Pluss

Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2019

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.