Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.
Set in 1951 around Puget Sound, this debut novel centers on a woman and a girl who, independently of each other and in vastly different circumstances, are abandoned.
While enjoying their lunch break outdoors on Elita Island, home to a federal penitentiary, two prison guards encounter a feral child who appears to be around 12, but is actually 17. Because the girl, who’s being called Atalanta Doe, doesn’t speak, the social worker assigned to the case is elated when she hears about Professor Bernadette Baston: “A woman child development specialist! How interesting, I thought,” she tells Bernadette when they meet. Bernadette, a curiosity as a woman in the psychology department at Seattle’s state university, specializes in language acquisition, but explains that she’s a scholar and can’t be expected to teach Atalanta to talk. Nevertheless, over the course of her visits with the girl, Bernadette becomes determined to learn how Atalanta got to the island, which will mean asking the area’s residents unwelcome questions. As it happens, Bernadette, too, knows something about surviving on one’s own: Her husband left four years earlier, when their daughter was an infant. Lunstrum builds her fathomlessly rich plot with sentences that suggest she has, as Bernadette describes a novelist’s job, “taken a polishing cloth to the surface of every word.” (Readers should be patient with early chapters that minutely recount what Bernadette acknowledges is “the teeming wildness” of her thoughts.) The novel succeeds as both a mystery and a pitiless look at the burdens that have historically been particular to female parents and professionals. As Bernadette observes a Tacoma detective’s lack of affect, she accepts that his “flat, stone-faced approach is a privilege she’ll never have.”
Immensely satisfying as both a mystery and an unblinkered look at working motherhood.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810147867
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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