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THE KNOWING

Name: THE KNOWING
Author: Sarah Elmore
ISBN: 978-0-692-09494-5

by Sarah Elmore ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2018

An often thrilling supernatural tale that explores the power of love.

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In this debut paranormal mystery, a shadowy figure murders a psychic, leaving the woman’s son to later pick up the pieces.

On February 2, 1997, Charles Young, a 38-year-old obstetrician in Manhattan, finds a cryptic letter from his wife, Meredith, the 32-year-old founder of Vista House, a foster home for children with psychic abilities. In it, she explains that she must run away to Lyle Mountain in Tennessee to save a girl from an “evil shadow,” in order to protect the “natural order.” That night in Lyle, 6-year-old Sheridan Hayes escapes her abusive father and soon comes face to face with the aforementioned shadow. After a dramatic series of events, Meredith saves Sheridan’s life by sacrificing her own. Authorities suspect that Charles murdered her—but then he’s apparently killed in an explosion, thought to be an act of suicide. One cop, Sheriff Walter Reed, doesn’t believe that the story is that cut and dried. In the novel’s second part, set in 2013, Charles and Meredith’s son, Derek, is now 26 and living in New York; he’s experiencing his own visions, like his mother did. Meanwhile, in Kensington Manor, Connecticut, Sheridan is now a 22-year-old artist; she goes to Lyle to confront her own painful past. Soon, the two characters’ lives merge in an exciting romance and a series of surprising twists, as they both try to make sense of their tortured childhoods. The book’s fantasy elements are creepy—a mute little girl at Vista House, for instance, looks eerily like Sheridan’s childhood doll—and they help to reinforce recurring themes of love, letting go of the past, and parental protectiveness. That said, Elmore’s story would have benefited from more descriptive dialogue; many of the characters’ over-the-top exclamations have the effect of trivializing their emotions, as when Charles finishes reading his wife’s letter and says, “No...please...God....Why, Meredith?”

An often thrilling supernatural tale that explores the power of love.

Pub Date: May 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-692-09494-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Bellamore Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 3, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.