A sharp, suspenseful portrait of a family on the verge of collapse.
Elise Sorenson has worked hard in hopes of someday making the Olympic dressage team. At last her dream beckons, but her ambition may destroy her marriage.
Matt Sorenson was raised by his grandfather Nate, who warned him against marrying Elise, a woman he saw as too driven to be a good wife. Cohen (The Search Angel, 2013, etc.) heartbreakingly spins out the dire consequences of Nate’s prophecy, as Elise seems to be punished at every turn. Her career comes at the price of a faltering marriage—her long absences limit Matt’s own career options and push him to assume both parents’ roles for their daughter, Gracie, who has cerebral palsy due to Elise’s fall from a horse while 31 weeks pregnant. And Nate’s disapproval always made her feel like an outsider at the Sorensons’ family cabin on Lake Placid—a home Matt plans to sell to invest in his law partnership. Unfortunately, he now feels compelled to use the proceeds to fund Elise’s Olympic bid. When the family heads north to get the cabin ready to go on the market, Matt quickly rekindles his friendship with the voluptuous Cass, his first love, who now lives next door. But as Matt repairs the cabin, he recognizes the gaps that separate him from the town—the men repairing his roof may remember Nate as a financial savior, but they see Matt as a privileged Manhattan attorney, an outsider. Then Gracie disappears and the Sorenson family splinters, as Cohen smartly sets each character’s crisis on a collision course with the others. Caught between her equestrian dreams and her suspicions about Cass, Elise risks losing everything. Even Gracie, with her hopes to be like other kids, risks too much. And as the summer progresses, Matt realizes that Nate’s legacy may be much darker than he remembers.
A sharp, suspenseful portrait of a family on the verge of collapse.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9968-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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