The intricacies of the grieving process are revealed in this sensitive novel.
A debut novel about loss, grief, family secrets, and the unexpected sources from which people take solace after unbelievable tragedy.
Cross-Smith (Every Kiss a War, 2014) follows three characters, alternating among their interlinked stories as they struggle to get on with their lives in death's shadow. We find the widowed Evangeline Royce snowed into her house six months after the death of her husband, Eamon, a police officer who was killed on the job. Eamon's lifelong friend Dalton Berkeley-Royce is with her, helping take care of her infant son, Noah, who was born 16 days after his father's death, and she's wrestling with guilt over her developing attraction to a man she'd previously thought of only as a friend. Dalton is also grieving Eamon, who was as close to him as a brother. After his mother committed suicide while he was in middle school, Dalton was adopted by the Royce family; he never knew his biological father. When Eamon died, Dalton swore to protect Evangeline and Noah; he struggles to fulfill that duty while coming to terms with a revelation about his own history and relationship with Eamon. Meanwhile, Eamon's ghost haunts the novel's proceedings both figuratively and literally. He narrates his own life and death from beyond the grave, providing crucial background on the tortured history he shares with Dalton. The structure—modeled after the musical conceit of the fugue, or a melody that is developed via interlocking parts—is an inspired way to tell what is otherwise a simple story. Beyond the tragedy of Eamon’s death and the will they/won’t they tension of Evangeline and Dalton’s relationship, not much actually happens. Instead, the novel is content to circle around the complexities of memory and family history on its way to a revelation that falls a little flat and is occasionally marred by clumsy prose.
The intricacies of the grieving process are revealed in this sensitive novel.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938235-38-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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