Electric, nimble, and perceptive, this novel is about “the phosphorous of grief” but also, more essentially, about the...
After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor’s young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to “an old form of justice” by giving his own son, LaRose, to the parents of his victim.
Erdrich, whose last novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award in 2012, sets this meditative, profoundly humane story in the time just before the U.S. invades Iraq but wanders in and out of that moment, even back to origin tales about the beginning of time. On tribal lands in rural North Dakota, the shooter, Landreaux Iron, and his wife, Emmaline, trudge toward their neighbors’ house to say, “Our son will be your son now.” As both families amble through the emotional thickets produced by this act (the wives are half sisters, to boot), Erdrich depicts a tribal culture that is indelible and vibrant: Romeo, a drug-addled grifter still smarting from a years-ago abandonment by his friend Landreaux (and whose hurt makes this novel a revenge story); war vet Father Travis, holy but in love with Emmaline; and LaRose, his father’s “little man, his favorite child,” the fifth generation of LaRoses in his family, who confers with his departed ancestors and summons a deep, preternatural courage to right an injustice done to his new sister. Erdrich’s style is discursive; a long digression about the first LaRose and her darkness haunts this novel. Just when she needs to, though, Erdrich races toward an ending that reads like a thriller as doubts emerge about Landreaux’s intentions the day he went hunting.
Electric, nimble, and perceptive, this novel is about “the phosphorous of grief” but also, more essentially, about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-227702-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
PROFILES
A fast-paced, twisty-turny mystery perfect for a cozy weekend read.
When a mysterious hacker exposes sensitive emails at Aldrich University, everyone’s secrets are laid bare to public scrutiny. But no one saw surgeon Greg Strasser’s murder coming.
The data breach reveals Blue Hill, Pennsylvania, to be a veritable Peyton Place of disgrace, including extramarital affairs, testing scandals, and fraternity rape accusations. Hidden in Greg’s trash folder are emails to a “Lolita Bovary” that cast him as certainly a philanderer and quite possibly a pedophile. After the Aldrich Giving Gala, Greg’s wife, Kit, awakens from a drunken stupor to discover him stabbed in the kitchen. Could she have killed him out of rage? Or perhaps it was Kit’s ambitious co-worker Lynn, eager to push Kit off the corporate ladder by framing her for murder? Then again, where was Lynn’s husband that night? And who is Lolita? Kit’s daughter, Sienna, is certainly sad about her stepfather’s death, but her friend Raina’s grief seems suspiciously excessive. Meanwhile, Kit’s sister, Willa, is back in town. An investigative reporter with secrets in her own past, Willa is loath to stay a minute past the funeral reception, but how can she refuse to help Kit stay out of jail? With nods to Big Little Lies as well as her own Pretty Little Liars series, Shepard (The Elizas, 2018, etc.) brilliantly hides the identity of the true villain in the gaps between characters. An Agatha Christie for the 21st century, Shepard masterfully crafts a prestigious town rife with hidden temptation and sin. So Willa gets her chance to play Miss Marple, albeit a much younger, hipper version, and her sleuthing deftly exposes unexpected links between characters. From chapter to chapter, Shepard’s plotting breathlessly careens between characters, with each cliffhanger swiftly answered by another, ratcheting up the stakes until the killer is finally unmasked.
A fast-paced, twisty-turny mystery perfect for a cozy weekend read.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4290-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.
A torturer-in-hiding examined from multiple angles by family and victims.
In this third novel from Danticat (The Farming of Bones, 1998, etc.), the past has a way of intruding on everyday life no matter how all of the characters try to stop it. Of course, when the past is as horrific as it is here, that should come as no surprise. The title comes from a Haitian term for torturer, the black-hearted Tonton Macoutes who enforced the Duvalier regime (“ ‘They’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away’ ”). The particular dew breaker at the heart of this story is an old man when we first meet him, on a trip he’s taking with his artist daughter down to Florida to deliver a sculpture she’d been commissioned to make by a famous Haitian-American actress. Each chapter brings another view of this same man, who escaped his crimes in Haiti to hide out as a barber in Brooklyn, and each is related by different people who knew him—his wife, a lover, one of his victims. The structure, however, isn’t necessarily one of slowly revealed mystery, an approach that could have cheapened the tale’s formidable emotional impact. Even though we learn more and more about the dew breaker as the story progresses—and by the end have been firsthand witnesses to his foul methods—Danticat seems ultimately less interested in him than in those around him, those who speak personally about the suffering he caused. It’s a wise choice, in that there is comparatively little that can be learned from practitioners of evil, whose motives usually come down to simple desires for money or power. Danticat’s voice is that of a seasoned veteran, her pages wise and saddened, struggling on “the pendulum between regret and forgiveness.”
Searing fiction with the lived-in feel of the best memoir.Pub Date: March 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4114-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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