A sometimes-unfocused but emotionally resonant novel.
An anonymous, dying poet unmasks himself to neighbors and family members in Schell’s (Woody, 2016, etc.) conclusion to the three-novel Folksong Suite.
Irene Louise McIntyre Nelley, known as Rainey, is a housewife living with her sassy Irish mother, her two precocious children, and her caring trucker husband in her beloved hometown of Stonyville, West Virginia, in the year 2000. She struggles to feel fulfilled while writing short stories and sporadically attempting to publish them. Her life changes forever, though, when her quiet, next-door neighbor, the elderly Cutch Anson Voltz, tells her a secret: he’s the revered, pseudonymous regional poet known as “Cabbage Smith.” Cutch, dying of cancer, asks her to read his poems at his eventual funeral. An awed Rainey agrees to share her own stories with him, and a careful description of her grandmother’s farm leads to an even bigger revelation: Cutch is, in fact, her mother’s long-lost brother. He quickly becomes an integral element of Rainey’s family, and numerous flashbacks demonstrate how he positively affected Rainey’s life in the past by encouraging her daughter to play music, for example, or by supporting Rainey’s brief attempt to run a natural-foods store. As Cutch’s death grows closer, the circle of people who know his secret grows wider and wider: first Rainey’s mother, then Cutch’s eccentric but brilliant barber, and finally the entire town. Schell gives his characters verbose, sometimes-poetic dialogue and finds striking images in Rainey’s everyday life (as when the family’s pet duck, mourning his deceased mate, finds solace by embracing his own reflection in a window). The plot can feel scattered as the flashbacks move the narrative back and forth in time; some elements also lack clear meaning, such as Rainey’s aforementioned store, whose true significance to her remains vague. Still, Rainey’s first-person voice is undeniably compelling throughout. The book’s last 70-plus pages consist of Uncle Cutch’s final work, the poetry collection Cross Street. Its verses are tedious when they descend into abstract wordiness but quite enjoyable when they embrace vivid imagery, as when one describes pansies as “Dark-eyed innocence shrouded in yellow; / dainty white noses with feline whisker.”
A sometimes-unfocused but emotionally resonant novel.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5412-1308-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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