A fascinating plot involving past and present bogged down by first draft–esque prose.
A new resident of a small Southern town finds herself pursued by ghostly guardians and real-life villains.
Beth Pearse has moved to Washington, North Carolina (the author’s real-life hometown), to make a fresh start. Five years after her husband, Brad, drowned due to an unexpected muscle cramp, Beth sets her sights on renovating an old building in close-knit historical Washington as a combination art gallery and home. Beth quickly falls for Sam Howard, a born-and-raised Washingtonian and historical preservationist who is involved in Beth’s renovation project. The relationship soon becomes romantic, but Beth continues to experience ghostly visions of a black woman warning Beth to watch her back. After Beth learns her new home was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, she and Sam discover the ghost’s identity: Selah Brown, a young woman who bought her freedom through sewing but met an untimely fate on her way to a new life. Beth settles into Washington life, making friends with construction worker Jose and his wife, Hellen, while keeping in contact with her business partner, Parisian art dealer Martin, and his family. In the meantime, Beth learns more of Selah’s story through the woman’s diary as Selah’s ghost continues to appear, guarding Beth from a person Selah can’t yet name. But when Beth is kidnapped by an unknown assailant and Martin receives ransom demands, he and Sam must team up to find out who’s keeping the woman against her will—and take a hard look at Washington’s own townspeople. Cooper’s (Sleeping Mallows, 2019) passions for local history and Southern charm are evident throughout the book, woven into an exciting story full of twists and turns as well as plenty of romance between Beth and Sam, two intelligent equals who respect each other’s work. Unfortunately, the writing style is overly formal and clumsy. Every character sounds the same—only Selah’s voice differs slightly from that of her modern-day counterparts—and flashbacks to Selah’s past, a recurring theme at first, cease halfway through.
A fascinating plot involving past and present bogged down by first draft–esque prose.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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