This placid tale about strangers converging on a farmhouse celebrates the joy of planning.
In this debut novel, coincidence brings people together to form an accidental family centered on an old woman’s farmhouse.
Somewhere in mountainous Northeastern America stands a farmhouse owned by Mrs. Edith Bradley, but most people call her Aunt Edith. Blind and elderly, she manages well with the help of Russell Mayhew, her handyman. But one stormy night, a hurricane sends a tree crashing onto the roof, unheard by Russell; Aunt Edith is trapped. At the same time, Samantha Anne Matthews—called Sam—arrives at the farmhouse. Having just broken up with her fiance and quit her job, she was on her way to a solo camping vacation, but her car went off the storm-crumbled roadway. Sam calls a doctor for Aunt Edith, who has a broken leg, and when he asks Sam to stay and provide moral support, she agrees. Russell decides to restart his construction company; with Sam’s background in advertising, she can help there too. Also showing up at the farmhouse are Abigail Winters, a woman running from her abusive husband, and her half brother, Dr. Jeffery Dale Barlow, who has tracked Abbi down to tell her that her spouse was killed in an accident. They, too, stick around. A series of coincidences brings to town yet more characters, including Edith’s grandson William Bradley Brackston and Sam’s roommate, Melissa, and everyone gets partnered with fulfilling work and romance. Together they form an extended family whose linchpin becomes Edith, now called Granny Edie. Barring a dramatic episode on a cruise ship, where Edith is kidnapped and leaves an SOS message stitched into a baby blanket, Apelt’s novel consists almost entirely of people making plans. Working out the logistics for Russell’s construction company, Abbi’s costume-sewing business, repairs and renovations to the farmhouse—every detail is described with relish and at length. Those without a taste for project management will likely find little to engage them. Coincidence is the main plot engine, ensuring that things fall conveniently into place. Some readers may agree with Granny that this “is surely a sign from God that He truly is the Master Planner,” and enjoy the way everything fits; others may find all the easy resolutions and conflict-free family life to be unsatisfying.
This placid tale about strangers converging on a farmhouse celebrates the joy of planning.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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