Soodak’s first novel, about an affluent New York mom and her rocky relationship with her own mother, considers several mother-daughter parallels.
Kara, born out of wedlock to a talented songstress and a brilliant composer, found life with her mother difficult. Her mom was both gorgeous and boozy, and treated her more like a girlfriend than daughter. Kara ached to leave her small town in Ohio behind and migrated to New York City, which held the key to everything she wanted in life. Of course, the thing she wanted most of all was Oliver, a rising young star in the art world; but a lasting relationship with Oliver wasn’t possible, and Kara soon finds herself recast as a mother, wife and businesswoman. Told partially in flashbacks that take Kara back to her childhood with her temperamental mother and her college days with the careless and sometimes emotionally cruel Oliver, the book opens with Kara finding the now-famous Oliver’s paintings exhibited in a nearby gallery. Married to a successful businessman, Michael, and the mother of three, Kara partners in a children’s hair salon, employs a nanny who lives in the couple’s small studio apartment next door to their place and befriends novelist Morgan, who cheats on her husband with a stranger. While Kara explores her mother issues and deals with nanny problems from her perch high in an expensive building, she gradually becomes aware that her daughter, Henny, is having problems at school. Set against the backdrop of the Big Apple, which Kara clearly loves, the book examines Kara’s life of pedicures, lattes and play dates in writing that flows. In the end, though, the most interesting parts of the book aren’t set in Kara’s present, in which she comes off as shallow and self-indulgent, but in her past, dealing with her drunken mother and crush on a man who was, at best, self-serving. Although Soodak’s portrait of a privileged upper-class New York mom rings true, once Kara crosses from college student to frazzled yuppie she ceases to be interesting and sympathetic.
Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-57426-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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