A novel with a compelling plot and intriguing characters but undermined by very uneven execution.
A war-weary doctor strives for love and redemption in a disease-ridden mill town in 1860s Massachusetts in Hirschhorn’s (A Price of Healers, 1983, etc.) historical novel.
John Spencer saw the horrors of war as a doctor with the Union Army. He arrives in Cromwell, Massachusetts, in 1865 with a letter of introduction to the town physician, Dr. Shaw Billings, who takes him under his wing, and he soon begins to build his own practice. Spencer marries Kathleen O’Connell, the daughter of a funeral-home owner, and while she’s pregnant with their first child, he encounters Elizabeth, daughter of Zebediah Harcross, the mill owner who effectively owns the town. She’s Harcross’ sole heir, to her father’s frequently expressed disappointment, because her brother died in the war. Harcross has dammed the local river in several places to provide water power for his mills. The resulting millponds, however, have attracted mosquitoes, and thus disease; every summer, epidemics of yellow fever devastate the community, but no one understands the cause. Meanwhile, Adam Ring, a Polish immigrant, partners with Kathleen’s father in a lucrative enterprise that moves from building coffins to selling insurance; meanwhile, the state’s established business interests try to use the law to shut them down at every turn. In the summer of 1866, Zebediah falls ill with a mysterious pain in his gut, and Spencer watches helplessly as disease threatens the town once again—with his wife and child now at risk. Hirschhorn re-creates a pivotal time in the history of medicine in which ignorance was displaced by observation and experimentation. His research into 19th-century New England business and medical practices is impressive, and there are many moving paragraphs about the horrors of war, poverty, and disease. However, sometimes the awkwardness of the text drags the novel down; misspelling is pervasive (“sophistocated”; “our’s”; “your’s”), and paragraphs are frequently broken. The author also uses foreshadowing much too often and without good reason. The treatment of the characters reflects the overall unevenness: the men have depth and detail, while the women (particularly Kathleen and Elizabeth) are superficially developed. The ending, in which many plot threads converge, feels rushed, and the climax is therefore stripped of suspense.
A novel with a compelling plot and intriguing characters but undermined by very uneven execution.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2015
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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