An uncomfortable romance that makes lovers’ worst decisions believable.
In this debut novel, a writer attempts to find the perfect girl by first “creating” her on paper, but is he looking for love or just some woman to force into his precast mold?
Lamenting over dinner about his inability to find his soul mate, Jonathan Bach is challenged by his famous author father and know-it-all brother to use his skills as a burgeoning novelist to invent the woman of his dreams, an act of self-actualization that might aid him in finding love. The chronically lonely Jonathan creates “Melissa” from a strict list of wants, covering her looks, personality, upbringing, social habits, even what color car she drives, and begins exchanging letters with her, writing responses from his imaginary girl. Four years later, enter Lisa, new to Seattle from Idaho, living with her social butterfly of a cousin Cathy and working at the pool hall that Jonathan frequents to flirt badly and spill Shirley Temples on himself. He is far from her type, a messy, socially awkward klutz stumbling through writing a hackneyed memoir about growing up the son of the 1970s literary superstar Richard Bach, yet they still develop a rapport. Jonathan is smitten, but though much about her parallels his Melissa, he secretly chafes each time she doesn’t quite measure up. Corbit’s novel is set firmly in the early ’90s, with references to the specter of AIDS, the Nancy Kerrigan–Tonya Harding scandal, Sade, and other cultural touchstones of the period. The tale’s main conceit of its male protagonist inventing a love interest and then attempting to find a woman to fit this rigid model is as creepy as it sounds. The result is somewhat akin to watching a horror movie—red flags appear regularly, and when Jonathan comes clean to Lisa about Melissa, the fact that she doesn’t flee will likely have many readers squirming. But his manipulations are subtle, wrapped up in Lisa discovering the city through him and enjoying clever conversations about Hemingway, charming moments even with the unsettling context. The book’s slow pacing for a quick romance is a little odd, mostly foreshadowing the ending. But this postmodernist Pygmalion is an apt metaphor for the fantasies and expectations that break down so many relationships.
An uncomfortable romance that makes lovers’ worst decisions believable.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017
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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