Despite the wrenching shift in tone, a soulful exploration of the limits and consequences of familial control.
A family of evangelical Christians is derailed by a daughter’s pregnancy.
In 1970, Jory, 13 going on 14, is growing up befuddled as the middle daughter of the Quanbecks, who contain their children in a religious and moral bubble as impervious as the bomb shelter in their garage. Jory’s father, Oren, a Harvard-educated astronomer, runs midnight laps in the backyard of their Arco, Idaho, home, and her mother, Esther, often takes to her bed with headaches. A bland, macrobiotic, sugar-free diet is rigorously enforced. Grace, 17, eldest daughter and the pride of the family, goes off to Mexico on a church mission but soon returns home, pregnant. She insists that God is the father of her child. The Quanbecks buy an isolated farmhouse on the outskirts of town and send Grace there to wait out her gestation period, with Jory as unwilling companion. Jory is appalled by the prospect of attending the oddly named Schism High School instead of Arco Christian Academy. Not only does Schism require a whole new wardrobe—bell bottoms and T-shirts instead of long skirts and modest blouses—but a whole new lifestyle. As kindly neighbor lady Mrs. Kleinfelter and Grip, a good-hearted ice cream man with a dubious past, act as eccentric mentors, Jory manages to weather her co-exile. Since the novel is told entirely from Jory’s point of view, and Grace does nothing much except stay home, the emphasis is, for some time, on vividly evoked but conventional scenes of teenage angst, as Jory worries about gym class, her first period, her popularity, an upcoming homecoming dance, etc. The action accelerates and so do the stakes when Grip introduces Grace and Jory to a hippie enclave, and Grace—very abruptly, since she has seemed so devout—embraces the counterculture. The repercussions of this for the entire Quanbeck family are dire indeed.
Despite the wrenching shift in tone, a soulful exploration of the limits and consequences of familial control.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42742-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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