An enjoyable, finely written fantasy tale.
A fabulist debut novel tells the story of an older couple on an unexpected voyage.
Harold and Mary Rose Grapes live in the most remote house at the highest point on Brent Island. They’ve spent 35 years there mourning the loss of their son, Dylan, but now the government is evicting them from their swiftly eroding cliffside dwelling and relocating them to a retirement home. But on the night before they are to move, a massive storm blows in and tears the house from its perch: “The last section of earth supporting the house broke away from the rest of the cliff. The cable groaned and finally snapped. The yellow house, along with a section of garden attached to the foundation, began to freefall toward the white-capped sea.” Luckily, when the foundation of the house hits the ocean water below, it floats. Harold links this miracle to the “petrified air pockets” in the island’s volcanic rock. An astonished Mary Rose asks: “You think that the rock around the basement is supporting the house? It’s why we’re floating like a cork instead of sinking?” Stranded at sea without electricity, water, or much food, Harold and Mary Rose must reawaken their past ingenuity in order to survive. Contending with dangerous animals and icebergs, the Grapeses sail their house as best they can, slowly leaving behind all the things tying them to the past: their grief, their property, the island that they never left. As they move toward a mysterious light on the horizon, they discover that even in their old age, life has surprises in store for them. More importantly, they still have the capacity to amaze themselves. Reina, as translated from the Spanish by Nelson (A Love for Rebecca, 2013), writes in a lyrical prose that highlights the magic of his magical realist premise: “Pieces of paper slipped like eels hiding between boxes and broken furniture.…Sunlight fell on the thick bottom of a broken drinking glass, passing though it like the glass was a prism, its light spraying into a fan of colors.” The book is wonderfully paced and suitably tense without ever drifting into melodrama. It reads like a cozy, middle-grade fantasy novel, but for an adult audience. The ending is perhaps a bit easy, but Reina succeeds in crafting a resonant fable of life’s autumn years.
An enjoyable, finely written fantasy tale.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0320-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
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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