An appealing work that combines YA-style tropes with college-age struggles.
A young woman unravels a family secret with her 12-year-old sister’s help in Falk’s debut novel.
Twenty-two-year-old Abigail Hartley is living at home with her parents in New York City, and her deadline to either enroll in college classes or move out is fast approaching. The cerebral young woman is indecisive about her next step: “I’m a yellow blip on a black screen and the ten-year-old controlling me is still learning how to play.” The sudden death of her estranged maternal grandmother spurs a desire to look into her shadowy family history. Abigail’s mom refuses to explain why they won’t be going to the funeral, and the young woman realizes that there may be only way for her to uncover what’s really going on: She’ll have to visit her mother’s Georgia hometown. In order to make the trip without her parents’ knowledge, she needs a plan, and she enlists her little sister Maddy’s assistance. Despite their age difference, they have a close and endearingly humorous relationship—one that that forms the emotional heart of Falk’s story. Take Abigail’s observation after the two log some significant bonding time: “ ‘Whoa. T.M.I., Mom.’ I just used a Maddy-ism. We’ve spent so much time together, I think I’ve absorbed her brain—it was small, and delicious.” The sisters’ search eventually leads Abigail to discover some troubled Southern history. Overall, this is a well-paced story that, despite its familiar structure, feels less like a bildungsroman than it does a feel-good fairy tale for young-adult readers. It’s to the book’s credit that it brings to light a particular facet of the history of racism in Georgia, where the majority of the book is set. It’s also revealing that it took such a journey for Abigail, a white character, to learn about racism’s effects on her own family: “racism is far from gone. It may not always be as obvious now as outlawed love or segregated schools, but it’s there.”
An appealing work that combines YA-style tropes with college-age struggles.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-988276-23-6
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Peasantry Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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