by Mary-Beth Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015
No question about this author’s gift for striking imagery and vivid scene-setting, but her characterizations could be...
Hughes (Double Happiness, 2010, etc.) follows a family reeling from the loss of a child through two disordered years in New Jersey and London.
It’s not just the death of 8-year-old Cubbie that’s weighing on Nick, Jean, and Lily Devlin as the novel opens in 1969. Nick has been pressured by his manipulative, amoral brother, Lionel, to take a London-based job with volatile cosmetics tycoon Billy Byron, and Jean is unhappy about relocating to England from their home in Gooseneck Cove, a wedding present from her adored father that she’s turned into a showcase. Eighth-grader Lily is struggling to master the intricacies of early-adolescent social interactions; her self-assurance isn’t bolstered by the condescension of her mean-girl best friend, Margaret, and she displays an unfortunate weakness for boys who alternately entice and reject her. The first few chapters are a whirl of names and relationships that don’t yet make a lot of sense, since Hughes is lavish with allusions and sparing with concrete information, which tends to arrive piecemeal. It’s quickly clear, however, that Jean is fonder of her brother-in-law than she should be, even though Lionel has landed Nick into serious trouble before, and that Nick likes to indulge himself with intoxicants and extramarital sex, a tendency that will only worsen in London. The family dynamic is somewhat reminiscent of Hughes’ previous novel, Wavemaker II (2001), as is the mood of lurking dread. Here, the withholding narrative style effectively induces in readers the same state of disorientation that envelops all three Devlins in London (whose business and social scenes are depicted as vicious and corrupt), but it also tends to alienate us from the characters. Final plot twists and long-delayed revelations back in the U.S. are shocking but delivered in an elliptical manner that muffles their emotional impact.
No question about this author’s gift for striking imagery and vivid scene-setting, but her characterizations could be deeper, and she might consider the possibility that atmosphere is not everything.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2249-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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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