Facebook Twitter Instagram

Deborah Donovan

FictionFamily Saga

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

Review by Deborah Donovan

Juliet Grames’ entrancing multigenerational family saga is based on the life of her grandmother, Stella, who was born in 1920 in the small Italian village of Ievoli and, 16 years later, immigrated with her family to Connecticut as World War II loomed over their homeland. Throughout The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, the author inserts fictional details into the life of her ever-stoic grandmother while focusing on her near-death experiences, which were well documented by family members and passed down over the years, including severe burns from cooking oil, an attack by a hungry pig, almost dying in childbirth and falling down basement steps at the age of 68.

Just as compelling as Stella’s story is that of her mother, Assunta, who was born in Ievoli in 1899 and was married at age 14 to a domineering and abusive husband. At first, Assunta’s sad marriage convinces Stella to remain single, but eventually she gives in to traditional mores and weds Carmelo Maglieri, another Italian immigrant. Stella’s independent spirit is stifled, finally, and she ends up raising 10 children, the last one coming when she’s 44.

The final 30 years of Stella’s life, following a partial lobotomy after her fall, are lonely ones. Estranged from her younger sister, whom she blames for her “seven or eight deaths,” Stella lives by herself, her grandchildren knowing her only as “an unintelligible crocheting grandmother engaged in a blood feud with her sister.” They have heard the facts of her many near deaths but know nothing of her feisty, independent spirit, now long gone.

Embellished with details of the extreme hardship experienced by Italy’s poor throughout two world wars and the bigotry encountered by those who immigrated to the U.S., Grames’ debut will find broad appeal as both an illuminating historical saga and a vivid portrait of a strong woman struggling to break free from the confines of her gender.

Juliet Grames’ entrancing multigenerational family saga is based on the life of her grandmother, Stella, who was born in 1920 in the small Italian village of Ievoli and, 16 years later, immigrated with her family to Connecticut as World War II loomed over their homeland.

FictionFamily Saga

Henry, Himself

Review by Deborah Donovan

In Stewart O’Nan’s latest engaging and immersive novel, he revisits the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh—a family his readers have come to know well from two earlier novels, Wish You Were Here (2002) and Emily, Alone (2011), which chronicled the early years of Emily Maxwell’s widowhood. This latest Maxwell family portrait returns to the year 1998 and focuses on 75-year-old Henry—retired and feeling somewhat purposeless—filling his days with garden chores, errands and repairing small appliances in his basement workshop.

One of O’Nan’s gifts is his ability to craft his characters with such uncanny attention to detail that the reader comes to care for them as the author does. So it is with Henry, whom we get to know more intimately as each chapter chronicles an event in his past or one aspect of his now circumscribed life.

In one, he reminisces about his dislike of piano lessons as a child until he developed a crush on his second teacher. (The annual recital will bring back memories for many readers.) Henry’s ritualized rotation of garden jobs according to the season—pruning, leaf-raking, taking down birdhouses, hanging up feeders—helps fill his days, as do the spring and summer golf outings with his three buddies.

Thanksgiving is the same each year as well. Henry and Emily’s son and daughter and their families arrive Wednesday night, when lasagna is served, and the next day’s feast always starts with shrimp cocktail and spinach dip. Several chapters chronicle the annual vacation spent at the family cabin on Lake Chautauqua: Henry and Emily open it up a few days before the kids and grandkids arrive, and then everyone pitches in with cleaning the porch, installing screens, painting the weathered window sills, stocking the refrigerator, etc. Henry is in his glory during these days—assigning everyone a job and checking on their progress. 

It isn’t necessary to have read the other novels in O’Nan’s Maxwell family saga to enjoy Henry, Himself. But readers who enjoy this poignant, everyman story will surely want to read them next. His stories of one upper-middle-class Pittsburgh family will resonate with many readers, especially fans of Anne Tyler’s character-driven novels set in Baltimore. 

In Stewart O’Nan’s latest engaging and immersive novel, he revisits the Maxwell family of Pittsburgh—a family his readers have come to know well from two earlier novels, Wish You Were Here (2002) and Emily, Alone (2011).

FictionThriller

Beautiful Bad

Review by Deborah Donovan

Annie Ward’s debut has all the familiar ingredients of the recent outpouring of psychological thrillers—dynamic but unreliable female narrators, a story that bounces between different characters’ perspectives, and secrets that remain buried throughout years of friendship or marriage—but it’s set apart by its unusual settings.

Maddie and Jo met as high school students on a summer exchange program in Spain. After college graduation, Maddie is in Bulgaria, teaching English at Sofia University, and Jo is an aid worker based in Skopje, Macedonia, a five-hour bus ride from Sofia. In 2001, the third pivotal character arrives in the midst of Jo and Maddie’s sojourn overseas: Ian Wilson, a security officer serving in the British army. Both women are fascinated by Ian, especially Maddie, who seems to be obsessed with him. Jo and Ian’s fling is brief, leaving Jo bitter and convinced that Ian is hiding evil underneath his humanitarian facade. Maddie continues to harbor feelings for him, even over years with little communication. Eventually, when Maddie returns to New York, she and Ian reconnect, which leads to their marriage in 2012. They move to her hometown of Meadowlark, Kansas—the only place where Ian feels he can cope with everyday life after the horrors he experienced in Bosnia and Rwanda—and start a family together.

Interspersed with these events are chapters from “The Day of the Killing,” though the reader doesn’t know the identities of the victim or killer. Maddie has suffered head injuries twice in her life, which may have affected her brain, and Ian suffers from PTSD. But which one is sick enough to commit a brutal murder?

A twist in the closing pages will catch even the most jaded reader off guard, making Beautiful Bad a good read for fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and A.J. Finn. 

Annie Ward’s debut has all the familiar ingredients of the recent outpouring of psychological thrillers—dynamic but unreliable female narrators, a story that bounces between different characters’ perspectives, and secrets that remain buried throughout years of friendship or marriage—but it’s set apart by its unusual settings.

FictionThriller

Watching You

Review by Deborah Donovan

Lisa Jewell’s domestic thrillers regularly show up on bestseller lists, and her latest, Watching You, should be no exception. The mysterious murder at its center unfolds gradually, as piece by piece the past and present relationships between her intriguing cast of characters begin to fit together.

Tom Fitzwilliam is the new headmaster of the Melville Academy in Bristol, England, and he’s called Superhead by the local newspaper due to his many postings to failing schools and his reputation for quickly turning them around. Tom lives with his wife, Nicola, in an upscale neighborhood. Nicola is an enigmatic, unhappy woman with a troubled past. Their only child, 14-year-old Freddie, believes he has Asperger’s. He hopes to work for MI5 one day and spends all his free time spying on the neighbors from his upstairs window, documenting what he sees with his camera and keeping a logbook of the neighborhood comings and goings.

One of Freddie’s voyeuristic targets is Joey Mullen, a young woman who lives two doors down from the Fitzwilliams. Joey is newly married and drifting from job to job. She and her husband live with Joey’s older brother, Jack, a physician, and his wife, Rebecca, a “strait-laced systems analyst.” Rebecca is pregnant, but she’s apparently not overjoyed about becoming a mother. Joey is completely smitten with Tom Fitzwilliam and begins planning how to meet him “accidentally,” which is all documented by Freddie’s watchful eyes.

Sixteen-year-old Jenna, a student at the Academy, and her mother live nearby, and they’re also subjects of Freddie’s surveillance. Jenna’s mother, who increasingly shows signs of paranoia, seems to believe she saw the Fitzwilliam family on holiday years ago, and that they were involved in an unpleasant incident that she can’t quite remember.

From the novel’s early pages, Jewell includes excerpts from police interviews conducted at the Bristol police station. The reader knows someone has been murdered but not their identity. Little by little, Jewell sprinkles clues about the pasts of each of her characters, and these hidden connections to the victim may turn out to be motives to commit murder. But only near the end does one suspect emerge as the killer—and a shocking final revelation completely takes the reader by surprise.

Jewell’s latest will be quickly devoured by readers of Gillian Flynn, A.J. Finn and Ruth Ware.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lisa Jewell’s domestic thrillers regularly show up on bestseller lists, and her latest, Watching You, should be no exception. The mysterious murder at its center unfolds gradually, as piece by piece the past and present relationships between her intriguing cast of characters begin to fit together.

FictionDebut Fiction

Family Trust

Review by Deborah Donovan

Silicon Valley, with all its excesses, lies at the heart of Kathy Wang’s insightful, witty and acutely honest debut novel of a Chinese-American family in crisis mode.

Patriarch Stanley Huang is dying of pancreatic cancer. His imminent passing is mourned by his two grown children, Kate and Fred; their mother and Stanley’s ex-wife, Linda; and his current wife, Mary. At the same time, each wonders just how their finances might be affected by his will, which has always remained a mystery. Stanley has hinted to Mary that he’s worth millions, but Linda is skeptical since she was the money manager during their marriage and knows that Stanley is clueless when it comes to investing.

Fred, though graduating with honors from Harvard Business School, is mired in a huge investment firm with little room for advancement. He begins to imagine the perks a few million would bring, though his discreet questions about the will are completely ignored. Kate also works for a tech company as a middle manager—and at the moment is the sole breadwinner in her family, as her husband has been on the verge of launching a startup for what seems like an endless number of months. An infusion of funds from her father’s will would obviously be most welcome.

Linda has invested wisely over the years since her divorce from Stanley. She’s financially stable, but she wants to make sure Fred and Kate get their fair share and don’t lose out to Mary, whom Linda knows expects to be handsomely rewarded for caring for her dying husband.

An intriguing side plot explores Linda’s involvement with an online dating site that harbors a global financial scam—one that, coincidentally, Fred barely escapes investing in himself.

Wang also graduated from Harvard Business School and worked in the tech field before deciding to write this engaging blend of family saga and Silicon Valley exposé. In Family Trust, her dissection of the glamorous appeal of this superficial slice of life succeeds on many levels and will appeal to a wide variety of readers.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Silicon Valley, with all its excesses, lies at the heart of Kathy Wang’s insightful, witty and acutely honest debut novel of a Chinese-American family in crisis mode.

FictionPopular Fiction

A Spark of Light

Review by Deborah Donovan

Following her incisive novel Small Great Things (2016), which delved into the white supremacist movement, Jodi Picoult takes on the explosive topic of abortion rights in A Spark of Light.

Picoult sets her story in Jackson, Mississippi—all the action taking place over one long day at the Center, a women’s clinic for those who had “run out of time and had run out of choices.” Picoult begins her riveting saga at the end of the story, when George Goddard—a distraught, anti-abortion father whose teenage daughter recently had an abortion at the Center—storms inside, fires several shots and takes an unknown number of hostages. Hostage negotiator Hugh McElroy has been called to the scene to confront George.

With her latest novel, Jodi Picoult takes on another explosive, timely issue: abortion rights in America.

Picoult then moves backward in time, hour by hour, gradually filling in the details of those who came to the Center that day and why they came. She approaches this divisive issue from all sides—not blaming or condoning, but shining a perceptive light into the lives of those now hoping to survive the hostage situation.

Izzy, a nurse, struggles with the dilemma of whether or not to tell her boyfriend about her newly discovered pregnancy. She’s risen from a childhood of poverty and doesn’t want to rely on him, “the prince from the entitled family.” After the shooting, Izzy tends to the leg wound suffered by Dr. Ward, whose own mother died from an illegal abortion. Dr. Ward regularly travels between four states to provide abortions for women living where almost all such clinics have closed.

Joy completed her abortion before the shooting starts—and although she wanted the procedure, she’s still in mourning for what she’s lost. She lived in foster care for 10 years and didn’t want another child to go through the same miserable experience.

Janine is at the Center faking a pregnancy—she’s an anti-abortion activist trying to prove the clinic doesn’t offer prenatal care. She lives with the guilt of her own abortion after she was raped at a fraternity party. In Picoult’s words, Janine has “white-washed the stain with years of pro-life activism.”

Also inside the Center that morning are Hugh’s teenage daughter, Wren, and his older sister, Bex, who has helped raise Wren since Hugh’s wife left them years ago. Wren is there for a prescription for birth control pills, and she asked Bex to accompany her so she wouldn’t have to walk alone past the line of protesters.

Interspersed with these stories of how each character came to be at the Center are the ongoing negotiations between Hugh and George, heightening the tension throughout the novel, even though most of the denouement occurs in the opening chapter.

A Spark of Light is another winner for Picoult—a provocative exploration of an issue that is in the spotlight now more ever before.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Following her incisive novel Small Great Things (2016), which delved into the white supremacist movement, Jodi Picoult takes on the explosive topic of abortion rights in A Spark of Light.

FictionFamily Drama

When tragedy strikes, who is to blame?

Review by Deborah Donovan

Proulx’s second novel opens an incisive window into the seemingly predictable lives of two upper-middle-class families that slowly unravel over one long year, following two calamitous events. Mia and Michael Slate are cruising into middle age—she’s a photographer, and he’s a partner in a money management firm with Peter Conrad, whom he’s known since high school.

At least Michael thought he was a partner, until one February evening when their lawyer arrives at the Slates’ door to tell them that when the company went through a restructuring process over a year earlier, Peter virtually “wrote Michael out” of their partnership. Michael knew his monthly share had been decreasing for a while, but he never looked into the details. Half a million in consulting fees have bypassed Michael and been funneled into Peter and his wife Helen’s personal account. Since Helen and Mia are best friends, and the Slates’ 17-year-old son, Finn, and the Conrads’ daughter have been buddies since childhood, Peter’s betrayal affects each member of both families.

This initiates the first real schism in the Slates’ marriage, for Mia is understandably angry and frustrated with Michael’s failure to monitor what was happening to their bottom line. But that same February evening, a much more tragic event occurs: Finn gets drunk at a neighbor’s party and passes out in the snow, and the temperature that night dips to 30 degrees below zero. He loses a hand to frostbite—and that loss reverberates throughout the rest of the novel. Who is to blame? Who feels guilty . . . and who wants revenge?

Finn withdraws from his parents, “loses” his prosthesis and skips six months of counseling appointments. Mia drifts further away from Michael, emotionally and sexually, and contemplates an affair. Michael escapes from home by means of nightly baseball practices with a homeless youth, an odd relationship that eventually leads to a violent act of revenge against Peter and his family.

Proulx deftly delves into the inner psyches of each of her flawed characters, bringing some level of understanding to their otherwise inexplicably bad choices. Her tale of the downward spiral experienced by these two families seems as real as if we were reading it in the newspaper or hearing it on the local news.

Proulx’s second novel opens an incisive window into the seemingly predictable lives of two upper-middle-class families that slowly unravel over one long year, following two calamitous events. Mia and Michael Slate are cruising into middle age—she’s a photographer, and he’s a partner in a money management firm with Peter Conrad, whom he’s known since high school.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

A bond between forgotten women

Review by Deborah Donovan

Thrity Umrigar’s eighth novel follows the main character of her bestselling The Space Between Us (2006), the servant Bhima, over the course of a year. The life of Parvati, a minor character in that earlier novel, becomes intricately entwined with Bhima’s in this sequel.

Parvati has the sadder background of the two: Sold into prostitution as a young girl by her desperately poor father, she spent two decades in a brothel before one of her regulars asks her to marry him. She trades one horrific life for another, as she is regularly abused by him and is left penniless when he dies. Now Parvati exists by selling six cauliflowers a day from her spot at an outdoor market; she sleeps under the stairwell outside her nephew’s apartment and eats leftovers from a nearby restaurant.

Bhima has been forced to leave one of her servant jobs and is looking for a way to earn extra money to help send her granddaughter, Maya, to college. She meets Parvati at the market, and they form a working partnership. As the two lonely women grow closer, they gradually begin to share their stories, listening without judgment to the secrets they’ve hidden from others—poverty, illiteracy, sexual abuse, multiple abortions, offspring who died from AIDS. Nothing is left unsaid.

Umrigar places these two old women, steeped in the strict class distinctions of their upbringing, in the midst of modern-day Mumbai. Through the character of Maya, the author builds hope for classes to better themselves, for gender equality and for a decrease in homophobia and sexual assault in India’s future. Her emotional portrayal of these two strong women will be a popular choice for book clubs, and for readers who enjoy multicultural family sagas.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Thrity Umrigar’s eighth novel follows the main character of her bestselling The Space Between Us (2006), the servant Bhima, over the course of a year. The life of Parvati, a minor character in that earlier novel, becomes intricately entwined with Bhima’s in this sequel.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Back to Beartown

Review by Deborah Donovan

Fredrik Backman’s engrossing fifth book is a sequel to Beartown, his 2017 novel set in a small town on the edge of a Swedish forest. As Us Against You opens, Beartown’s future is threatened: first by the possible closure of its only factory, and second by the bankruptcy faced by the town’s hockey club. Hockey isn’t merely a game to the town’s inhabitants—their whole lives revolve around the Bears’ wins and losses.

Beartown’s anxiety is further fueled by a major shift in the Bears’ team roster. After the rape of the general manager’s daughter, Maya, by a team member, as chronicled in Beartown, the team was torn apart. Some Bears abandoned the team and joined the Bulls from the neighboring town of Hed. Those who stayed in Beartown are some of the best players, but the remaining team lacks the size and experience of the Bulls.

Backman’s latest saga focuses on the first hockey season following the schism, brilliantly portraying the way each magnetic character copes with the hatred and violence that has engulfed these two small towns as their teams prepare to do battle. Maya struggles to move on from her traumatic experience, constantly aware that many blame her for the team’s demise. Her best friend, Ana, carelessly reveals that their friend Benji, one of the team’s best players, is gay. Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, constantly face backlash from a town that blames their report of Maya’s rape for the team’s problems. Vidar, the younger brother of one of the town bullies, is mysteriously released from a detention camp to be the Bears’ goalie. Ramona, a widow who runs the local bar, lovingly supports the pack of “hooligans” who resort to violence in support of their team. The new Bears coach is a woman, an ex-professional player who struggles to gain the acceptance of the town and her players. And lurking in the background is a Wizard of Oz-like figure—a politician trying to manipulate the team and factory to enrich his own pockets.

Backman stirs this volatile mélange of disparate characters until the inevitable explosion occurs, leaving Beartown sadder but perhaps wiser than before. His depiction of this small town will resonate especially with readers who struggle with the racism, homophobia and misogyny that exist in their own communities.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fredrik Backman’s engrossing fifth book is a sequel to Beartown, his 2017 novel set in a small town on the edge of a Swedish forest. As Us Against You opens, Beartown’s future is threatened: first by the possible closure of its only factory, and second by the bankruptcy faced by the town’s hockey club. Hockey isn’t merely a game to the town’s inhabitants—their whole lives revolve around the Bears’ wins and losses.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Love and memory, marred by war

Review by Deborah Donovan

Nick Dybek’s haunting, vividly cinematic tale is set in rural France after the horrific World War I battle at Verdun, where almost a million men died. Each of Dybek’s three central characters has a tie to the site of the carnage—beginning in 1921 with Tom Combs, a young American ambulance driver working for the church, collecting remains from the battlefield to be placed in a huge ossuary, which will eventually hold the remnants of 130,000 French and German soldiers. Tom diligently carries out his macabre assignment, even as he ponders how to tell those searching for their missing loved ones that “the shelling was so incessant during the battle that a man’s remains might be buried and unburied and blown a mile into the distance and buried again?” Hundreds of bones are found every day, “mangled and unmatched.”

It is there that Sarah Hagen comes, searching for her husband, Lee, who was in the American Field Service and went missing in 1918. Perhaps to ease her evident stress from a long and fruitless search, Tom tells her he met Lee in Aix-les-Bains while Lee was on leave. Tom and Sarah begin an intense yet brief affair—she is immersed in grief, and Tom feels guilty over his lie. She leaves Verdun to continue her quest, and Tom moves on to a job as a journalist in Paris.

Dybek’s story then moves from Verdun to Bologna, where a year later Sarah and Tom meet again—both drawn by reports of an amnesiac patient in a mental hospital who may be Lee Hagen. There they encounter Dybek’s third enigmatic character, Paul Weyerhauser, an Austrian journalist who has his own wartime backstory—and a reason for questioning the amnesiac.

The narrative leaps forward to Los Angeles in the 1950s, where Tom and Paul meet unexpectedly at a funeral. Each has his memories of Sarah and their time together in Italy—memories viewed through different lenses and clouded by time. Dybek’s poignant tale of the harsh realities of war juxtaposed with a dreamlike love story will linger with readers in the same manner as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Nick Dybek’s haunting, vividly cinematic tale is set in rural France after the horrific World War I battle at Verdun, where almost a million men died. Each of Dybek’s three central characters has a tie to the site of the carnage—beginning in 1921 with Tom Combs, a young American ambulance driver working for the church, collecting remains from the battlefield to be placed in a huge ossuary, which will eventually hold the remnants of 130,000 French and German soldiers. Tom diligently carries out his macabre assignment, even as he ponders how to tell those searching for their missing loved ones that “the shelling was so incessant during the battle that a man’s remains might be buried and unburied and blown a mile into the distance and buried again?” Hundreds of bones are found every day, “mangled and unmatched.”

FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

A father calls his children home

Review by Deborah Donovan

Elisabeth Hyde’s latest novel, like her two most recent—The Abortionist’s Daughter (2006) and In the Heart of the Canyon (2009)—displays her marvelous gift for creating vibrant and believable characters while keeping a keen, often humorous eye on their less desirable traits. In Go Ask Fannie, her sixth work of fiction, Hyde focuses her perceptive lens on Murray, 81, the beloved patriarch of the Blair family. A widower for 32 years, he invites his three grown children to his rural New Hampshire home for what he hopes will be a weekend of sibling bonding.

Ruth, the oldest, is a typically dominant firstborn. A lawyer in D.C., she is the most removed and therefore hasn’t noticed Murray’s age-related foibles, but she also has the most to say about what should come next for their father: an assisted living facility. George, 44, is an ICU nurse and marathon runner who lives an hour away from their father, in Concord. Lizzie, 38, is a tenured college professor living only a 20-minute drive away from Murray and therefore is his most frequent caregiver. Lizzie also causes Murray the most worry, and is the reason he has called the siblings together. A few days earlier, Lizzie’s most recent lover dropped her late mother’s Fannie Farmer Cookbook into a sink full of water; in a rage, Lizzie poured boiling water on the man’s laptop, burning his hand in the process, and she may be sued at any time.

Hovering over this hastily arranged long weekend are two deaths from a car accident 32 years ago: that of Lillian, the children’s mother, and of their sibling Daniel, who was 15. Lillian was a stay-at-home mom who longed to be a published writer. She spent all her free hours in a tiny space on the house’s third floor, typing her short stories on an ancient Smith Corona. The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, in which she scribbled first lines of stories that came to her while she was cooking for her endlessly hungry brood, is beloved by her remaining children, as they think it’s all that’s left of her writing endeavors.

Hyde moves back and forth in time between this family conference in 2016 and the early years of Murray and Lillian’s marriage, ending with the tragic accident in 1984. Each character is crafted with such an incisive eye for detail that the reader feels as if she has been dropped into the middle of this family confab—Hyde makes it easy to relate to what each family member is going through.

Hyde’s insightful and engaging novel is highly recommended, especially for readers who enjoy family sagas by Sue Miller and Anne Tyler.

Elisabeth Hyde’s latest novel, like her two most recent—The Abortionist’s Daughter (2006) and In the Heart of the Canyon (2009)—displays her marvelous gift for creating vibrant and believable characters while keeping a keen, often humorous eye on their less desirable traits. In Go Ask Fannie, her sixth work of fiction, Hyde focuses her perceptive lens on Murray, 81, the beloved patriarch of the Blair family. A widower for 32 years, he invites his three grown children to his rural New Hampshire home for what he hopes will be a weekend of sibling bonding.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres every Tuesday.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features
Subscriptions