July 16, 2018
In Hobson’s scattershot debut, three grown sisters—Georgina, Jax, and Pippa—converge on their troubled parents’ waterfront mansion along the banks of Lake Ontario. Ostensibly summoned there for a garden tour, each of the sisters arrives burdened with emotional baggage: Pippa, eight months pregnant, has curiously left her husband and four children back in New Zealand; Georgina, an academic, is alienated from her own husband, also an academic; Jax, also married, has unresolved romantic issues with a high school love interest. Add to this confluence of marital drama the bizarre, licentious relationship between the women’s parents, David and Margaret, and the plot starts to seem like a few bad marriages too many. The tour leaves David’s beloved garden trampled, then a mysterious young woman, dubbed “Goldilocks” by Margaret, shows up sleeping in a guest room bed. From there, the novel tips into melodramatic territory, as readers discover of a slew of secrets and revelations, including Pippa’s husband’s interest in polyamory. Though occasionally evocative, the writing isn’t precise or particular enough to sustain interest in the novel’s various scandalous threads. The stately house at the center of the novel exerts a profound hold on its characters, one that never fully grabs the reader. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.
July 15, 2018
The six days during which the variously dissatisfied Blackfords reunite around a family crisis are marked by bad behavior, old secrets, and recalibrated life choices.David and Margaret Blackford may make an attractive couple, but he considers marriage "a sour deal" and she wants him to fail, "any chance to take him down a notch or two." Their three adult daughters, Georgina, Jacqueline, and Philippa--given quasi-boys' names because David always wanted a son--also express disenchantment and grievances about their lives and marriages: Georgina yearns to go back and take a different path; Jax, like her father, blames her spouse for her own failings; and Pippa wishes there were more to life than drift. Hobson's debut is founded in this family's repetitive chorus of complaints, which the author casually pulls apart, injects with absurdity and some horror, and then reassembles. The family home is a vast mansion sited on five acres of parkland overlooking Lake Ontario, a luxurious dwelling but also a place of violent intimacy. The lavish garden is David's pride and joy and is about to be opened to the public, against Margaret's wishes since Pippa--heavily pregnant with her fifth child--is suddenly on her way home from New Zealand, and the other girls are returning, too, to lend support. Hobson's narrative is calm even when her consideration of individual characters is interrupted by flashes of wild revelation or event, from the farcical garden tour to the perilous fall of a newborn off a cliff. In the novel's surreal, sexually avid, sometimes fairy-tale world, such extremes might shock, or else might appear to be false starts, keeping the reader off balance within a teetering landscape.A tale of scorching family dysfunction that ranges among the gothic, domestic, and carnal, snagging the reader's attention with its odd, unpredictable vision.
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September 1, 2018
We've seen this type of dysfunctional family before, but first novelist Hobson refreshes the trope in a family psychodrama that upends the old stereotype that all Canadians are bland and inoffensive. David is an egocentric monster, while Margaret is both his victim and enabler, yet their adult children still crave their approval. The parents live in a palatial mansion near Hamilton, Ont., overlooking the lake. Money and status are all that matters; this family's emotional life is as cold as Toronto in January. Daughters George (Georgina), Jax, and Pippa have returned for a summer visit, bringing their troubles with them. George is the oldest and most responsible, Jax is like her father, and youngest daughter Pippa, who is eight months pregnant, has left her husband and four children back in New Zealand. Over the course of a disastrous weekend in August, family secrets come to light and tensions reach a boiling point, as a darkly comic garden tour from hell brings disturbing strangers into the mix. David's elaborate garden is practically a character of its own. VERDICT Hobson draws a riveting picture of twisted family dynamics in this compulsively readable novel.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
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August 1, 2018
Several years after Georgina and Jax moved out to begin their own careers and families, they are called back to their family mansion on the edge of Lake Ontario for the sake of their youngest sister, Pippa, who is pregnant and unwell. Pippa leaves her husband and four children in New Zealand and joins her family in Canada to heal on the cusp of her father's first summer garden tour. Over six intense days in each other's company, the sisters' long-locked-up secrets threaten to undermine them as they seek vengeance, fulfillment of their desires, and the exploitation of the weaknesses of others. When the deeply buried truths are finally revealed, each family member must face the consequences of his or her actions. Hobson's debut novel is packed with complex relationships and a torrent of emotions as she lifts the highly composed veil from a seemingly put-together, affluent family and brilliantly exposes the lust and betrayal behind their palatial walls. The intricacies of Hobson's characters and her exceptional new voice will keep readers riveted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from June 1, 2018
Upping the ante on his exuberant, inventive debut, The Black Minutes (2010), Solares returns with a hugely ambitious, two-part crime novel depicting the near-total breakdown of society in the fictionalMexican port city of La Eternidad, Tamaulipas, presumably modeled on his hometown of Tampico. In part one, ex-cop Carlos Trevi�o, run out of town because he dared to catch a killer, is hired to find a powerful businessman's kidnapped daughter. Part two is told from the POV of his nemesis, the powerful and wholly corrupt Police Chief Margarito Gonzales, who now has urgent problems of his own. Plot summary is pointless. This is a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale set in a society where there is no center to hold; where the army, police force, and drug cartels all function as gangs with complex agendas and shifting alliances; and where human life comes unspeakably cheap. Solares offers a harrowing vision of how it all works, or doesn't, from the bribes that grease the wheels to the blood that paints the walls, to the last gasps of the peaceful town and the natural world around it. Exposition occasionally intrudes upon the fiction, and the lack of linearity will deter some readers, but this is another urgent and vital work from a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)