by Mario Alberto Zambrano ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2013
A contemplative yet discordant collection of stories about where life’s scars originate.
A young Mexican-American girl recounts the heartbreaking dissolution of her entire family.
This debut novel from former professional ballet dancer Zambrano, written from the point of view of a tween girl who has inadvertently become a ward of the state, smacks a bit of experimental fiction, largely due to its deliberate construction. It is a journal written by 11-year-old Luz Castillo, who refuses to speak to others. Instead, she shuffles and reshuffles a deck of Lotería cards, a Latin American game of chance featuring 54 macabre representations of various objects or animals. With each flip of the card, Luz reveals some little memory, painstakingly rendered, about her family. It’s a slowly told tale delivered in short, ambiguous chapters. “I’m not a piece of news in the Chronicle she can just pick up and read,” Luz complains. “It’s not like that, not black and white. If anything it’s like a telenovela with a ranchera in the background playing so loud you can’t even hear your thoughts anymore.” Over time, Luz reveals the story of her deeply dysfunctional family—the mother that abandons her children and her Papi who drinks heavily and flies into such a rage over a sexual indiscretion that he breaks Luz’s arm. And then there is Estrella, Luz’s motherly older sister who lies at death’s door in the ICU of a local hospital, her fate even more uncertain than her little sister’s. The broken tale and imaginative first-person narration lend weight to this curious novel. It’s an impressive first step for an artist exploring a new medium.
A contemplative yet discordant collection of stories about where life’s scars originate.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-226854-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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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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