by Lisa Tucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2004
Predictable tale of a working-class homegirl making good on her mistakes.
Tucker (The Song Reader, 2003) delivers another brisk hard-luck saga for undemanding readers.
Narrator Patty Taylor, single mother of a two-year-old, has a good gig as the lead singer for a talented band traveling the Midwest trying to make a name for itself, even though she’s mostly viewed as a meal ticket while band leader Jonathan aims for the higher world of Art. When Rick, the father of Patty’s baby, gets paroled after three years in jail on drug charges, he comes looking to resume their intense first-love romance. Patty has moved on, or so she says, but she can’t make Rick believe it. Backstory: with little education (though she mentions she got her GED before son Willie was born, “so he’d never have to feel like his mother wasn't good enough”), Patty is plagued by a self-defeating lack of confidence, fed by an alcoholic mother who routinely threw the teenager out of the house, blaming her marital unhappiness on her daughter. Rick filled the emotional vacuum in Patty’s life, and he did take care of her, until his arrogant dalliance in drugs revealed an ugly side to his controlling nature. Second-novelist Tucker earnestly tries to allow Patty to grow as a responsible mother and a person with a mind of her own, but the the story is crippled by its caricatures of meanness in Rick, Mama, and even the band’s oily agent, who threatens to fire Patty one minute and sends her flowers the next. The lightweight, fast-moving prose, describing superficial actions with little introspection, makes this feel like a YA. Even Jonathan, perhaps the only character who regards Patty as more than a “dumb chick,” never grows beyond the stereotypes of a stock character. It’s too bad, because readers will like Patty and wish her author had given her more to think about.
Predictable tale of a working-class homegirl making good on her mistakes.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-6446-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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