Given an impressive track record that runs from Facing the Music (1988) to The Rabbit Factor (2003), few will doubt that in...
The inhabitants of a rural Mississippi town circle one another warily, just steps away from open conflict, in Brown’s busy sixth novel, left unfinished when he died in 2004.
Valedictory introductions by the author’s friend Barry Hannah and editor Shannon Ravenel offer pre-emptive strikes against anticipated criticism, but they really aren’t necessary: Even incomplete, the book has much to offer. Its cast of vivid characters features septuagenarian farmer Cortez Sharp, soured by caring for a moribund wife confined to her wheelchair and enslaved by TV, who channels his energies into a pond on his property to be stocked with catfish. We also meet Cortez’s supplier, Tommy Bright, whose fish farm is endangered by his gambling debts; Cortez’s daughter Lucinda, living in Atlanta with boyfriend Albert, who’s afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome and speaks in rhyming obscenities; and Cortez’s tenant Cleve, an African-American ex-convict who undertakes to discourage the soldier who’s courting his daughter. The most substantial subplot focuses on neighboring youngster Jimmy, who becomes Sharp’s unlikely confidant, and Jimmy’s unnamed father, an embittered maintenance man who follows his straying wife’s adulterous example with unforeseen and depressing consequences. Brown digs deep into these weathered souls, repeatedly surprising the reader with quirky, explosive behavior and even contrary moments of grace. He was unexcelled in describing people at work and the whiplash confusion of sudden, violent action. Though the narrative was clearly building toward a complex resolution of its separate elements, the final 60 or so pages—which really ought to have been separated from the main text and presented in an appendix—are only disjointed stabs at a conclusion.
Given an impressive track record that runs from Facing the Music (1988) to The Rabbit Factor (2003), few will doubt that in time, the author would have completed the task and perhaps even crafted a great book.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 1-56512-536-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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