by Lorna Landvik ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999
Landvik’s third effort (Your Oasis on Flame Lake, 1997, etc.) has an appealingly wacky frolic to it but induces groans when it strives for serious insight. The far outpost of Tall Pines, Minnesota, is a whirlwind of romance, violence, and minor characters who are downright weird. Fenny, for openers, was born to adventuring parents, who were constantly perplexed by her lack of bravado. When she was 19 (three years ago), they died in a freak accident in Belize (truck, tandem bicycle). In her grief, Fenny began to hang out at Cup O—Delight, a cafÇ owned by Lee, the red-haired and queen-sized heiress who came to Tall Pines fleeing an abusive marriage. Other locals include a Vietnam vet who vocalizes like a dog (post-traumatic stress) and a pair of art-collecting lesbians (one black, with a blond beehive; the other Swiss, with an annoying accent and a fez). While scouting locations, a Hollywood scriptwriter spies the fetching Fenny, and before you know it she’s starring in a local shoot. When Big Bill saunters into town—tall, dark, and handsome—both Lee and Fenny fall in love with him and a pas de trois ensues. Meanwhile, Pete, a humble shoemaker, is in love with Lee. Unable to tell her, he secretly makes ’shoes of love” for her. Just as he’s about to speak the truth and give her the shoes, Lee’s deranged ex-husband bursts into the Cup O—Delight and starts a shooting spree. Pete takes a bullet and dies saving Lee. The shooting disperses everyone else and brings about several ham-handed epiphanies. Eventually, Bill finds himself in a quickie wedding and the father of a love child, but not with the same woman. And Fenny learns that she’s brave after all! Happiness and chuckles all around. Not dull, even amusing at times. But with its soap-opera dialogue and just-add-water characters, it will chafe with wanting more. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-43317-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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 Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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