A thoughtful, engrossing tale about sowing order in the midst of chaos.
A woman takes a job as a housekeeper at a monastery in rural New Zealand only to discover surprising levels of crime and drama in this debut literary novel.
The Hokianga, New Zealand. When a nun comes to offer Jill Strachan work as a housekeeper at the local Anglican monastery, she isn’t sure what to think. Sister Isobel, the founder and head of Saint Clement’s Hermitage—as the former goat farm is known—is an odd woman with bad teeth who insists that religious life is a battlefield. Jill’s husband, Martin, who has been wheelchair-bound since an accident, thinks the job can be a necessary source of income for the family, though Jill knows she will have to bring her “precocious” 4-year-old daughter, Melissa, along. Jill and her family move onto the grounds of Saint Clement’s, where Sisterbel (as Melissa calls her) cheerfully demands they follow her rather strict monastic rules. Jill soon finds herself spending a lot of time with Gary Barter, a former rock star-turned-handyman who has been tasked with reforesting the area with eucalyptus and other trees. Martin continues to spend time with his creepy friend Liam “Spook” O’Donnell, who encourages his darker moods and self-destructive behavior. Before long, Jill and Gary discover that the monastery’s grounds are being used to grow illegal marijuana and criminals are machine-gunning wild goats in the area. It turns out the quiet life at the monastery may be a battlefield after all. Campbell’s prose is measured but vivid, capturing both the idiosyncratic culture and landscape of the setting: “Melissa’s kauri looked quite naked in the grove. Mute and lonely, it stuck up from the patch of trampled clay. It had no more presence than a weed. We are joined again to the earth, Jill thought, which our feet have never ceased to tread.” The novel proceeds at a ruminative pace through each of its 400-plus pages, and there are several spots where readers will be in danger of becoming bored. While it certainly could have been shorter, the book’s meditation on its characters and their struggles—as well as its romantic setting—will mostly manage to please.
A thoughtful, engrossing tale about sowing order in the midst of chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70693-001-3
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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