A vivid and authentic tale about family secrets.
In this debut historical novel, an unexpected guest with news of her husband’s death forces a woman to finally reveal to her daughter the circumstances of her father’s leaving them to become a traveling preacher.
Established by freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War, Capernum, Maryland, is the very picture of small-town America, its folksy population dwindling as its young people seek opportunities beyond it. Few from the outside ever visit the place anymore. Such is the oddity of the man who appears on the doorstep of Miriam Crane with news of the shooting death of her long-absentee husband, Saul. With it, the unspoken peace of the Crane household is broken, and Miriam’s daughter, Ruth Benning, demands the truth about why her father left years before. The story her mother relays recalls a traveling parish drawn to Capernum’s origins and its nomadic preacher, Isaac, whose charismatic sermons inflame the passions of many townsfolk, especially Saul. When a jealous, spurned follower lashes out against the preacher and kills him, Saul feels called on to serve in Isaac’s place even if that means leaving his wife and child behind. But while her husband’s exodus causes her great pain, even more disturbing are the questions it leaves Miriam with, about whether she has led the life she has wanted or the one she was meant to and if it was her, not her husband, who should have taken up Isaac’s cause. Hall’s novel captures the timelessness of its rural setting, creating in Capernum a small community struggling against its own stagnation, where everything private is public; religion is ubiquitous in everyday life; and politeness and hospitality are the default even in times of doubt and fear. The last is particularly significant, as much is left unsaid in the book’s excellently crafted dialogue for just those reasons. Around those lies of omission, the story thrives on illustrating little moments that speak volumes, from an infant’s grip on its mother’s finger and a sidelong glance from a wife to an unnoticing husband to a daughter’s refusal to turn on a light in the presence of her sick mother. These instants are often both loving and cruel, obvious to the reader, and even more heartbreaking for going unseen by the characters.
A vivid and authentic tale about family secrets.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2017
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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