A smart, complex domestic thriller.
A mother and daughter find new appreciation and understanding for each other when their lives are threatened.
When New York University student Cleo shows up at her mother Katrina’s Park Slope house for dinner, she finds signs of a struggle—and her mother’s shoe covered in blood. Mother and daughter had been estranged since Katrina interfered in Cleo’s relationship with a white-collar drug dealer, but Cleo instantly snaps into action, determined to find her mother. Aided by a sympathetic cop and hindered by her lackadaisical father (who’s separated from her mother), Cleo investigates her mom’s computer as well as her place of business. Katrina had always led Cleo to believe she was a patent attorney, but it turns out she was a fixer for wealthy and powerful people. She was also, in her youth, an abandoned child who lived at Haven House until she was adopted at the age of 14. Cleo finds her mother’s journal from those years and feels appalled—and guilty—to read about the abuse her mother endured. As Cleo is drawn deeper and deeper into the details of her mother’s life and disappearance, she herself may be in danger. McCreight alternates first-person chapters about Cleo’s search with chapters in Katrina’s voice about the days leading up to her disappearance, and also includes the occasional transcript of a therapy session, journal entry, or legal document connected to one of Katrina’s big cases. The build-up is extremely well paced and effective, created brick by suspenseful brick. No one, of course, is who they seem. Eventually the two main narratives converge in a somewhat flat climax—but most of the loose threads are satisfactorily tied up. Both Katrina and Cleo are tough as nails and vulnerable as hell, which makes it easy to root for them both against all the forces of (mostly masculine) evil they have to combat.
A smart, complex domestic thriller.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536421
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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