Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.
Set in 1951 around Puget Sound, this debut novel centers on a woman and a girl who, independently of each other and in vastly different circumstances, are abandoned.
While enjoying their lunch break outdoors on Elita Island, home to a federal penitentiary, two prison guards encounter a feral child who appears to be around 12, but is actually 17. Because the girl, who’s being called Atalanta Doe, doesn’t speak, the social worker assigned to the case is elated when she hears about Professor Bernadette Baston: “A woman child development specialist! How interesting, I thought,” she tells Bernadette when they meet. Bernadette, a curiosity as a woman in the psychology department at Seattle’s state university, specializes in language acquisition, but explains that she’s a scholar and can’t be expected to teach Atalanta to talk. Nevertheless, over the course of her visits with the girl, Bernadette becomes determined to learn how Atalanta got to the island, which will mean asking the area’s residents unwelcome questions. As it happens, Bernadette, too, knows something about surviving on one’s own: Her husband left four years earlier, when their daughter was an infant. Lunstrum builds her fathomlessly rich plot with sentences that suggest she has, as Bernadette describes a novelist’s job, “taken a polishing cloth to the surface of every word.” (Readers should be patient with early chapters that minutely recount what Bernadette acknowledges is “the teeming wildness” of her thoughts.) The novel succeeds as both a mystery and a pitiless look at the burdens that have historically been particular to female parents and professionals. As Bernadette observes a Tacoma detective’s lack of affect, she accepts that his “flat, stone-faced approach is a privilege she’ll never have.”
Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810147867
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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