LITTLE MONSTERS

A family’s trauma laid bare.

As with her memoir, Wild Game (2019), Brodeur sets her debut novel on Cape Cod, whose terrain she knows intimately, within a family, like her own, harboring secrets and lies. It's the summer of 2016, a contentious election looms, and marine biologist Adam Gardner is deeply unsettled by his impending birthday. Soon to turn 70, he feels on the cusp of a great discovery about humpback whales—a discovery, he believes, that will finally earn him the accolades he deserves. Suffering from bipolar disorder that he has managed to keep in check with medication, he decides to free himself from “the mind-numbing effect” of those meds in order “to succumb knowingly to the allure of mania.” The immediate effect is energizing: He professes “a remarkable facility with a broad and unexpected range of topics: Shaker furniture, Tibetan culture, black holes, Homer, string theory, you name it,” and, most notably, the language of whales. Adam’s 70th birthday party is the central event of the novel, an occasion when his son, Ken, an arrogant real estate developer with political ambitions, and his daughter, Abby, an artist just becoming recognized, will present him with gifts they hope will elicit the praise and admiration they desperately covet. Raising Ken and Abby on his own after his wife’s death, Adam was a difficult father, distracted by grandiose professional ambitions, undermined by his mental illness. He called his children his “little monsters.” Ken, bullied at school, felt neglected; Abby felt demeaned as both a woman and an artist. Adam thought of her as “a special snowflake of the highest order.” As Brodeur’s narrative unfolds, tensions erupt, revealing festering wounds, anger, and pain. Through Ken’s sessions with an unfortunately stereotypical psychiatrist, the shocking details in Abby’s latest painting, and the appearance of a mysterious woman, the family’s “conspiracy of silence” is irrevocably shattered.

A sensitive portrait of troubled lives.