WHAT WE'VE LOST IS NOTHING

Name: WHAT WE'VE LOST IS NOTHING
Author: Rachel Louise Snyder
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2517-8

by Rachel Louise Snyder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 2014

Snyder’s writing is crisp and clean and the premise is unique, but readers may find the characters less than compelling.

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Snyder’s debut novel takes place in the two dramatic days following a series of burglaries in an upscale Chicago neighborhood.

Residents of Ilios Lane in Chicago’s Oak Park neighborhood wanted to believe they were helping change attitudes toward diversity, but when someone breaks into the homes in this more affluent area bordered by mostly minority-occupied homes and apartments, subtle changes begin to take effect. The ones who see the most change are the members of the McPherson family: daughter Mary Elizabeth, who is skipping school when the break-in happens, tripping out on ecstasy with her Cambodian friend, Sofia; her mom, Susan, a true believer in diversity who has worked her entire adult life to integrate local neighborhoods; and her father, Michael, who sees a chance to step up to the plate and be the liaison between the violated families and the police. The others involved in the break-ins have various reactions to the crimes. Mary Elizabeth finds her proximity to the burglars has made her the target of Caz’s attention. Caz, a boy at school who has ignored her in the past, seems smitten by her. Sofia finds herself in hot water with her parents. Susan is determined not to let the incident scare off prospective tenants. Alicia and Dan must return from a vacation in Florida to visit her indulgent parents. A semiblind neighbor finds himself beseeched to move in with his sister, and a French chef discovers his authenticity questioned. Snyder’s book encompasses a time period beginning with the discovery of the crimes to a final, life-changing showdown that takes place at the end of the emotionally and physically exhausting experience.

Snyder’s writing is crisp and clean and the premise is unique, but readers may find the characters less than compelling.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-2517-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WOMEN WE BURIED, WOMEN WE BURNED
by Rachel Louise Snyder

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NO VISIBLE BRUISES
by Rachel Louise Snyder

- PROFILES
A Liberal Oasis Becomes a Cauldron of Inequity

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.