Buwalda’s writing, in translation from Dutch, is a cut above the potboiler this might be with more corpses. His strength are...
A family saga that is variously compelling, trashy and horrific, this debut has rough edges and plausibility problems—not unlike the Stieg Larsson trilogy—and movie written all over it.
Siem Sigerius is a former judo champ whose math skills help him rise to head a Dutch university. While on a business trip, he discovers his beautiful stepdaughter Joni is the main character in a homemade porn website, which she has developed with her partner, Aaron, and turned into a seven-figure enterprise. Into the picture shambles Wilbert, Siem’s son from his first marriage, a nasty character whom Siem and Joni perjured into jail six years before the main action begins. Buwalda, a one-time Dutch journalist, shifts points of view and time frames, making frequent allusions to one terrible event while maintaining a patina of familial order, of dinners, dates, vacations. Yet not only do awful revelations and revenge hang over the household, the family is marked across generations by small and large deceits. The jagged structure suggests a film director who went into the editing room with some coke and bourbon and cut his footage with runic abandon. The method works in part to stoke suspense. Siem’s surprising fate is referred to laconically on Page 69, one impetus for it starts at 249, and the big blow doesn’t arrive until near the end. At the same time, some things stoke disbelief, notably what pushes Siem over the edge and Joni’s progress from website floozy to McKinsey intern to submersion in the California skin trade, shedding a husband and child along the way.
Buwalda’s writing, in translation from Dutch, is a cut above the potboiler this might be with more corpses. His strength are sustained scenes that will linger in memory after other parts of the brain have given up on fitting together the pieces of this puzzler.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-553-41785-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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