by Porter Schell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 21, 2016
An often colorful and emotional read, particularly for those who enjoyed the author’s previous work.
Schell (Woody, 2016, etc.) tells another tale set in Stonyville, West Virginia, in the second book of his Folksong Suite series.
Ennis Diehl, 13 and gifted, has already skipped three grades, and folks in his hometown of Stonyville expect him to become a doctor. He looks forward to leaving his rural birthplace, if only to escape his tempestuous mother, the acclaimed singer Molly Evangeline, and his mentally disabled 16-year-old brother, Mickey. He inherited his quick wit from his complicated mom, and he’s fiercely protective of his sibling, but his relationships with both can be suffocating: Molly’s exacting standards cause constant domestic strife, and Mickey’s adoration and dependence make him feel like “Mickey the manacle.” These dynamics come to a head when a dispute over a catch during a baseball game leads Ennis to bet that Mickey can beat Stonyville’s athletic champion, Quinn Whelan, in a foot race. Mickey wins, but he collapses from heat stroke afterward, setting off a new battle between Ennis and his mother, and later, a humiliated Quinn gets unwittingly drawn into con artists’ plans to kidnap the Diehl children for ransom. Along the way, Ennis takes solace in spending time with his relatively calm father, Mark Diehl, and his girlfriend, Inga Sandersen; Molly prepares to relaunch her singing career after years out of the spotlight; and Mickey experiences adult responsibilities in a garden-center job and adult desire when he develops a crush. The fictional setting of Stonyville in Schell’s second series installment remains a vivid creation, filled with memorable characters and complex socio-economic dynamics. The conflict between Molly and Ennis is particularly well-drawn, rendering a mother-son battle as a wrenching, believable clash of troubled souls. But although Schell’s lyrical, if occasionally impenetrable, prose style served him well in his previous novel, it’s less suitable for the omniscient, third-person point of view here, as the characters’ voices often sound too similar. For example, when the theatrical Molly says something grandiose, it fits her character, but it feels out of place when 13-year-old Ennis says things such as, “It’s the season of sensibility, summer, so many of us gathering to toast the music of life.” The book’s ending is also too abrupt. Overall, though, this remains a moving account of a family navigating change as time marches on.
An often colorful and emotional read, particularly for those who enjoyed the author’s previous work.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5412-1249-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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