A disheartening debut.
A young man finds unrequited love and loses a goat in Dolnick’s first novel.
When he flunks out of college, Henry Elinsky moves into his brother’s Manhattan apartment and takes a job at the Central Park Children’s Zoo. When he’s not tending pigs and sheep, he spends his time trying to get a girl named Margaret to fall in love with him. He also eats Reuben sandwiches and feels fat. Henry is self-absorbed, rather cowardly and not very bright, and his story heaves fitfully from merely tedious to actively unpleasant. Dolnick makes little use of the zoo and its denizens. It never seems that Henry works at the zoo because his creator made a conscious, artistic choice to put him there. It seems, instead, that Henry works at the zoo because that is where he happens to work, and one suspects that he happens to work there because Dolnick happened to once work at a zoo. To call this a coming-of-age novel is misleading, as the protagonist does not mature in any meaningful way. At the end of the story, he’s preparing to go off to college, which means he’s back where he was before the story began, and the narrative gives us no reason to think that Henry has grown emotionally or intellectually from his summer of shoveling animal excrement, pining for an unavailable girl and reading The Hunt for Red October. What the narrative provides instead is the image of Henry turning this unsatisfactory summer into an equally unsatisfactory record of that summer. Henry’s account of his months in New York doesn’t include much in the way of reflection or analysis, but it does include a depiction of the creation of that account. Perhaps it’s inevitable, in this memoir-laden age, that writing about one’s experience becomes not a method for processing it—understanding it, learning from it, transforming it—but, rather, a substitution for any such process.
A disheartening debut.Pub Date: May 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-27915-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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