An enjoyable tale about a wealthy couple who learn that building a house is more than they bargained for.
A construction project divides a family on the eve of the 2008 recession.
In this debut novel, humor columnist Tognola uses her own experience building a house as inspiration for the story of Janie and Wim Margolis, residents of Westchester County. Their plan to move from one side of town to the other turns into a demolition and construction project that takes over their lives, threatens their relationship, and damages their finances as the housing market falls apart. Janie, a stay-at-home mom, oversees the building of the family’s dream house. She and Wim drift apart as the designs become bigger, fancier, and more expensive, and as Janie develops a crush on the architect. When Wim loses his job as an investment banker, Janie has to confront the financial realities she has been steadfastly avoiding. She and Wim will now have to work out their relationship issues along with their real estate challenges. Interspersed among the chapters narrating the construction of the house are flashbacks to Janie’s past, from her childhood separation anxiety to her romance with Wim as a Europe-backpacking college student and their early married life with her family in California. Tognola is a good writer with a strong sense of both pacing and prose (“Hunched over the plans like a rabbi among the Dead Sea scrolls”). This results in an engaging tale despite a protagonist who will grate on readers as much as she aggravates her husband. Janie’s excuse-making (“I was too lost in the joy and delusion of buying a glittering crystal chandelier to care”) and deliberate obtuseness (“I was essentially like a child. I didn’t pay bills, I didn’t know how much things amounted to, and I blithely assumed everything would be okay”) make it tempting to dismiss her struggles as First World problems. But both Janie and Wim are ultimately fully realized characters (although their children are largely in the background), and the book is an entertaining read, a relatively lighthearted portrayal of a difficult piece of recent history.
An enjoyable tale about a wealthy couple who learn that building a house is more than they bargained for.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-624-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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