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The Surgeon's Obol

Name: The Surgeon's Obol
Author: A. Stuart\

by A. Stuart\ ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

The plucky heroine and made-for-TV tragicomic scenes and dialogue make this a promising debut.

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A young woman breaks into a male-dominated field and re-evaluates her faith during a grueling hospital internship.

Medical student Isabella “Izzie” Isaksen follows her father into surgery through an internship at Ohio Memorial General Hospital. A year of constant fatigue and gruesome operations lies ahead. A routine gastric bypass goes awry, a transplanted heart refuses to beat, and an 80-year-old man appears with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Meanwhile, this debut novel gives an account of Izzie’s loss of faith—“I grew weary of God’s plan and its mysterious unfairness”—as she sees good people diagnosed with horrific illnesses, such as Father Guinell’s pancreatic cancer. Surgeons also engage in sensitive discussions about quality of life versus last-ditch treatment. (At one point, a doctor observes: “It would absolutely be tragic to remove a tumor and leave a crippled, bed-ridden, tube dependent person in your wake.”) At the same time, Stuart piles on the laughs at this hospital resembling Sacred Heart from TV’s Scrubs. Interns yell out answers as if they were on a game show, there are Seinfeld and I Love Lucy references, and colleagues’ banter is laced with nicknames and expletives. One raunchy scene finds fellow intern “The Donald” Trenbauer incapacitated and priapic in a supply cupboard; Izzie has to treat him in secret. Stuart narrates the medical procedures in impressive but not overwhelming anatomical detail. Metaphors are pleasantly inventive, like “the Beaujolais flowed in buckets from the abdominal cask” and “Laparoscopic surgery is a lot like making a ship in a bottle.” But an endotracheal tube diagram and a minilesson about O negative blood seem less fitting. Stuart doesn’t follow through on a potential romance Izzie strikes up with her neighbor, and the tale delivers a fairly sudden ending. Still, it’s gratifying to see this intrepid woman infiltrate a field “polluted by machismo,” even if the title’s symbolism about making sacrifices—“we all have to pay the boatman”; an obol was the Greek coin traditionally used—to succeed is somewhat belabored. With obvious punctuation errors and typos (“Chekov” and “a clear conscious”) cleaned up and a title and cover more appropriate to the tone, this jaunty novel would pack a wry punch.

The plucky heroine and made-for-TV tragicomic scenes and dialogue make this a promising debut.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

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.

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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.