Erotica fans may be disappointed by this thinly plotted bodice ripper.
Sex and drugs—mostly sex—overpower a young fashion model’s luxurious lifestyle in this graphic tale of desire.
Katie Wolfer, a 24-year-old supermodel, abruptly flees a runway show in Paris when she receives the news that her mother has committed suicide. All that’s left of her family is her wealthy stepfather, Daniel, and her two stepsiblings. Returning to New York, she takes up residence with Daniel and his children in their extravagant Hamptons home. Hungry for pleasure, Katie shirks off mourning her mother in favor of her own libido, and she engages sexually with everyone from the handsome man beside her on her flight from Paris, to her stepsister, Caroline, to a pair of young peeping Toms in the Hamptons. Finding her life in flux, she pushes forward in pursuit of sex, flirting dangerously with how sexual prowess shapes her identity as a young woman. No erotic stone goes unturned in her escapades: Katie finds herself in situations ranging from sex in public to group sex to bondage. However, the most troublesome of all her yearnings is what she feels for her stepfather, Daniel—would sleeping with him validate her new, open-minded quest for pleasure or condemn her as someone who’s crossed a disturbing line? The feverish addition of drugs, glamour and money leads Katie to a definitive answer in the novel’s final pages. Jumping on the Fifty Shades of Grey bandwagon, this novel is packed with more sex than plot, as each chapter centers on a titillating and explicit sex scene. The sexual encounters tend to offer more pornography than passion, with a preference for cringe-worthy metaphors, including everything from “water snake” to “lollipop.” Katie’s brush with near incest seems gratuitous as the book struggles to up the ante on each chapter’s over-the-top escapade. While Katie occasionally reflects on how her reckless behavior affects her identity, her character is otherwise flat; readers learn more about her favorite designer miniskirt than her emotional landscape. The story is hellbent on showing an outrageous lifestyle, but the result is more confused discomfort than a compelling narrative about sexual expression.
Erotica fans may be disappointed by this thinly plotted bodice ripper.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 163
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2013
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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