by Sarah Domet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016
Domet’s (90 Days to Your Novel, 2010) energetic prose, institutional setting, Christian fabulism, and fervidly wacky...
Four girls, all named Guinevere, come of age in a convent in wartime.
“Of the Guineveres, Gwen was the prettiest, and she understood this as fact, not opinion.” It is Gwen who teaches the other three—Win, Ginny, and Vere—to use berries for lipstick, and she who devises the plan for their escape from the Sisters of the Supreme Adoration. Inspired by a movie in which a chorus girl popped out of a cake, the girls hide themselves inside the chicken-wire–and–tissue-paper hand on a parade float, planning to bust out once it’s parked overnight. The failure of the plot is the beginning of their friendship, as told by Vere. She never locates the story in a specific place or time, nor does she identify the war that rages beyond its borders, but she brings the convent and its inhabitants to life with great verve: the pinch-faced nuns, the alcoholic priest, and the troop of girls in their care. There are The Specials, “who still had contact with their parents, who received letters and birthday cards and postcards”; The Sads, “whose parents had died suddenly and sometimes violently: in fires, in automobile accidents, in suicides”; The Poor Girls, “taken away…from their destitute families”; The Delusionals, who believe they are going home any day now; and the Guineveres, bursting with life and nascent sexuality in these rigid confines. When four comatose soldiers are delivered to the Sick Ward of the convent, each of the girls adopts one of the boys and falls in love with him.
Domet’s (90 Days to Your Novel, 2010) energetic prose, institutional setting, Christian fabulism, and fervidly wacky plot—revolving around the ability of the comatose to get a hard-on—will appeal to fans of John Irving.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08661-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A tour de force.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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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