A deeply disturbing, furiously tender, and darkly comedic debut.
A young girl comes of age in a house of horrors.
In the Demo, a nondescript prefab development, there is a house where a young girl and her dysfunctional family live. Belgian writer Dieudonné’s debut novel, which has already won multiple awards in France, follows an unnamed narrator who fears her father, an abusive big-game hunter; denigrates her mother, a battered wife; and adores Sam, her bright-eyed younger brother. After the two siblings witness a tragedy, their lives are forever changed. Sam retreats from the world and finds comfort in the carcass room where his father’s trophies are mounted. The narrator becomes convinced she’s living in an alternate reality that she can rewrite: “It made everything seem more bearable.” She spends the next few years trying to change the past to save her younger brother—who has stopped smiling, started hurting animals, and become their father's shooting buddy. She studies quantum physics, feels stirrings of forbidden desire, and begins recognizing the dangers of her intelligence and budding body. After a tense moment with her father she has a moment of realization: "I understood that, from now on, just like my mother, I, too, had become a prey.” The novel portrays trauma and abuse with both seriousness and a touch of humor. When talking about the way her mother prepares meals, the narrator says, “She did like an amoeba might, with neither creativity nor taste, but lots of mayonnaise.” Dieudonné’s writing captures momentous and mundane moments with equal insight and beauty: “The houses of the Demo smelled of old damp swimming towels forgotten in a sports bag,” and “[the sounds] escaped from her like jets of steam from a pressure cooker.” Despite a slightly underwhelming ending, Dieudonné’s startling debut tackles dark themes with grace, wit, and sincerity.
A deeply disturbing, furiously tender, and darkly comedic debut.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64286-047-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
A tour de force.
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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