by Lisa Lutz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
An offbeat, darkly witty pre–#MeToo revenge tale. The patriarchy doesn’t stand a chance.
High school English teacher Alex Witt jumps from the frying pan into the fire when she takes a job at Stonebridge Academy, a Vermont boarding school.
Alex doesn’t love teaching, but it’s a living, and she’s hoping for a new start at Stonebridge after a debacle sent her packing from her last job. Dean Gregory Stinson, a friend of Alex’s famous author father, Len Wilde, is happy to give her a place on staff, but a bait and switch has her teaching creative writing instead of English. Alex isn’t thrilled but settles into getting to know her class. Her initiation isn’t easy: Someone leaves a dead rat in her desk, and strange, vaguely threatening notes keep appearing at her barely livable cottage. Weeding out the good eggs from the troublemakers isn’t easy, but Alex gives it the college try and even makes a few (maybe) friends among the staff. When a student named Gemma Russo makes Alex aware of an exclusive online forum called the Darkroom, where Stonebridge boys post photos and text about their sexual exploits and girls are vigorously scored, Alex can’t ignore what’s happening, but she’s not eager to put herself out there in the face of adult enablers and vicious boys who will do anything to keep their toxic traditions alive. Luckily, Gemma is quietly recruiting an army to take the nasty little cabal down, and Alex offers guidance, never guessing just how far things might go. In 2009, when this is set, the term “boys will be boys” wasn’t yet being truly challenged as an acceptable explanation for entitled, misogynistic male behavior, and questions of consent weren’t at the forefront. Stonebridge is a perfect example of this kind of dysfunctional, entrenched culture. Lutz (The Passenger, 2016, etc.) draws on the droll humor and idiosyncratic characterizations that make her Spellman novels so appealing, and just about no one is quite who they seem. But kindness and decency do manifest in surprising places, revealed through the alternating narratives of Alex, Gemma, and others.
An offbeat, darkly witty pre–#MeToo revenge tale. The patriarchy doesn’t stand a chance.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-1823-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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