FRACTURES

Name: FRACTURES
Author: Lamar Herrin
ISBN: 978-1-250-03276-8

by Lamar Herrin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013

While fracking is a foregone conclusion in this beautifully crafted novel, the riveting drama lies in the buried emotions...

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Novelist, memoirist and short story writer Herrin (Romancing Spain, 2006, etc.) has managed to transform the high profile, politically divisive issue of fracking into a thoroughly human, moving family drama.

Sixty-year-old Frank Joyner has been living on his upstate New York farm with his grandson Danny while Danny’s mother (and Frank’s favorite child), Jen, sorts out her confused love life. But now the retired architect—a believer in continuity and sustenance whose crowning achievement has been the renovation of his boyhood school into a mixed-use apartment/retail complex—faces a dilemma. The farm, which he inherited from his mother, sits atop the Marcellus Shale, and his neighbors have all signed lucrative financial leases allowing Conklin Natural Gas to drill for natural gas on their lands using hydraulic fracturing. As reported by a journalist who has made Frank less than popular around town, Frank’s natural inclination is to leave the land alone. But as Frank’s son Mickey explains, even if Frank turns down the deal, the vertical drilling done on neighboring land will turn horizontal and run under his farm anyway. And his mother’s will stipulated that Frank share any benefits from the property with his two sisters, who could use the fracking lease money. On the other hand, Mickey, a high school history teacher going through his own messy psychological/spiritual crisis, points out the potential lasting value of the seemingly hopeless symbolic act. In fact, all of Frank’s loved ones and extended family are going through their own messy crises except maybe his oldest son, Gerald, who has escaped to California. Then, Frank’s pushy ex–brother-in-law engineers a meeting between Frank and a representative from Conklin’s competition. Not only do idealist Texan Kenny Brewster and Frank feel an immediate affinity, but Jen finds herself falling for Kenny as well. Herrin avoids moral self-righteousness about the political issue or the motivations that drive his characters.

While fracking is a foregone conclusion in this beautifully crafted novel, the riveting drama lies in the buried emotions that are unearthed for better and worse.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-03276-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- PROFILES
Fracking Threatens to Rupture a Family in Fractures

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE
by Lisa Jewell

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FAMILY REMAINS
by Lisa Jewell

- BOOK REVIEW
INVISIBLE GIRL
by Lisa Jewell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.