A refreshingly quirky and sharply written family tale.
In this novel, a young man finds a naked woman on his couch and must confront the possibility that she’s traveled through time.
Angus Wendell is a quietly ordinary man. He has an unspectacular job, lives alone in an apartment on Long Island, and possesses “a face no more arresting than the next one in the throng.” But his routine is thrown into disarray when one day he wakes up and spots a naked woman—a stranger—fast asleep on his couch. When she finally stirs, Sylvia Tipton, as astonished at the circumstances as Angus is, confesses she has no idea how she got there; the last thing she remembers is a terrible fire that consumed her grandfather. And then the shocking incident takes a turn for the weird: Sylvia claims to live in Brooklyn, but when Angus drives her to the address she provides, there’s a McDonald’s there. In addition, she’s never seen a cellphone before—or watched Star Wars—and seems wildly out of touch with the world. Finally, Angus discovers the source of her confusion: She thinks it’s 1943 (it’s actually 2014). But when Angus starts to check her claims, in particular regarding her family and the fire, he discovers they’re true. Even more startling, he inadvertently learns that he and Sylvia have a connection, which causes Angus to believe there’s something suspicious about the nature of his family’s business—the clan owns a museum and deals in antiquities. Marullo (Gludman’s Proof, 2013, etc.) masterfully presents a wildly implausible story in such a way that it seems possible—Sylvia is astonishingly convincing: “The ironclad sincerity through which she narrated events in her life made it feel natural to take everything she said as gospel.” And beneath the fantastical mystery and crime drama is a sensitive examination of Angus’ discontentment with life—he has a degree in art history and wants to pursue a career in that cosmos but is discouraged by his hilariously dysfunctional family. The author has an impressive talent for blending farcical comedy with emotional authenticity.
A refreshingly quirky and sharply written family tale.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-42705-8
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Marullo Publications
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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