A pleasingly madcap but not quite coherent Caribbean mystery.
An alcoholic, epileptic gunsmith-cum–adventure novelist navigates Key West’s criminal underworld in Rovina’s rollicking debut.
Jack Slater and his stepsister, pediatrician Danielle “Pooka” Sloan, have retreated to South Florida’s Cheeca Lodge for some R & R after the slew of dangerous exploits documented in Slater’s semi-autobiographical novels. As well as fictionalizing family feats, Slater refurbishes guns for Davy Jones’s Locker. He gets a tip about antique ammunition to be salvaged from a 1930s shipwreck and sold to the Sicilian mob. The setup promises a lighthearted gangster romp, but Rovina adds layers of complexity through Slater’s seizures and vivid daydreams, including encounters with alluring sphinxlike alien Lucasia McCall. Slater’s charming first-person narration echoes that of an Ernest Hemingway hero or a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler detective. The salvage plot gets rather lost, though, in a welter of drunken visions, pleasure cruisers, operatic arias, Greek mythological allusions, manga imagery and eccentric minor characters. The reliance on potted superficial descriptions dooms the characters to be similarly shallow (women are especially stereotypical: either 1940s femmes fatales or soft-porn anime heroines). While breathlessly overfull at times, the novel, ironically, takes off slowly. Pages pass with little happening apart from characters lounging waterside, drinking cocktails, enjoying steel-pan music and liaising with criminals. Such languid pacing might suit the breezy, Jimmy Buffett atmosphere, but it does little to hold attention. Readers may also be somewhat alienated by the outmoded technology: The book’s origin in 2000 is reflected in Slater’s devotion to his Cassiopeia PDA (simply replacing it with an iPad could have made this up-to-the-minute). Rovina’s descriptive passages are strong, however, and occasional made-up words (“bumpkinishly,” “sad-sackness”) lend the prose a playful sophistication. With a gangsters-’n’-guns plot, mild raunchiness, preoccupation with technology past and present, and unexplained phenomena, the novel shows traces of nouveau steampunk-lite gems, like Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker (2012), but a silly deus ex machina ending shortchanges the novel.
A pleasingly madcap but not quite coherent Caribbean mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 187
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
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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