A shrewdly unique portrait of everyday America.
This second installment of a two-volume novel charts the everyday lives of the members of a Missouri-based family and its acquaintances.
The first volume of Dieker’s (The Biographies of Ordinary People: Vol. 1, 2017) unusual work opens in 1989, introducing Jack and Rosemary Gruber and their three young girls, Meredith, Natalie, and Jackie. This sequel picks up with Jack and Rosemary in 2004—their girls have grown, and the family faces the trials, tribulations, and trends of the new millennium. Meredith, the eldest of the Gruber sisters and the novel’s most engaging character, has just graduated from college and is still determined to become a writer. When her internship at a Minneapolis theater company falls through, she is forced to take a position in telemarketing. The tale follows her occasionally precarious attempts to stake her claim in life, her jobs, her dates, and her dream to write professionally. A criticism of the first volume was that nothing much happens outside of daily rituals. The same can be said here; the characters send emails, surf the internet, load the dishwasher, and pour coffee—all rather mundane. Jack teaches; Rosemary still works at the bank. But while this sequel continues to meditate on the humdrum, it is far from boring. Subtle changes, from struggling with dial-up internet access and wondering “what’s a blog?” to using online video chat and emojis, cleverly create the overarching sense of time passing, the incremental ticking of the clock in other people’s lives. Dieker’s writing is remarkably intuitive and descriptive, understanding and detailing subtle traits of human nature: “Meredith sighed, the little grunt of air out of her nose that Jackie had been listening to almost her whole life.” As in Volume 1, there is a lack of narrative drive here, which may deter some readers. In many respects, this approach feels intentional and remains faithful to the pattern of day-to-day existence, which does not always yield a story. This is a thoughtfully conceived book that is mindful not only of technological progressions, but also the cyclical nature of life—ending on Meredith’s 35th birthday, the age of her mother at the opening of the first volume.
A shrewdly unique portrait of everyday America.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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