Happiness, though, is rare and fleeting in Jones’ dark world.
Three generations of oppressed mothers.
Australian novelist Jones (Swan Bay, 2003, etc.) makes the burdens of motherhood central to his grim portrayal of women’s lives. Alma, born in 1892, living in an industrial suburb of Melbourne, has just left her philandering partner and, with two young children and no source of income, is desperate, angry, and “a great hater.” A charitable woman and her son, Alfred, house the family temporarily, but Alma’s life continues to unravel. Succumbing to Alfred’s advances, she becomes pregnant, and soon after her daughter Molly is born, Alfred disappears. When a low-paying job ends, Alma, victimized by the precarious economy of the 1930s, leaves 7-year-old Molly at an orphanage—its humane, nurturing environment a bright spot in the bleak novel—retrieving her after two years when Alma finds a man to care for her. Molly’s sense of a stable family, though, is short-lived: soon, Alfred returns, and Molly discovers, sadly, that her life “was a fraud,” and those she thought were her family “had lied to her and tricked her.” Molly eventually marries Percy, an engineer, whose economic prospects lift her above the penury of her childhood. But Percy, like all the men in this novel, has serious flaws: he is exacting, impatient, “a man of slide rules and design specifications.” They adopt a newborn baby, David, whose erratic, nervous disposition Molly blames on herself for failing him emotionally. David, like Molly, is the child of an unwed and abandoned woman, coerced into giving him up. He, in turn, gets his girlfriend, Cathy, pregnant. But in the 1960s, marriage seems too bourgeois for the supercilious and hot-tempered David. Yet even though he seems “unhinged” and sometimes terrifying, Cathy believes that a woman “can only be happy with a husband.”
Happiness, though, is rare and fleeting in Jones’ dark world.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-922147-22-6
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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