Monday's Reviews Today: McMahon's Latest & A Housing Bubble Victim
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/23/2009 2:52:00 PM
In Jennifer McMahon's "outstanding" new novel, Dismantled, the bestselling author follows a group of friends trying to put a dark secret from their past--while living together after college a prank leads to one friend's death--to rest. McMahon "allows the inexorable sense of dread to build incrementally" in this taut thriller. And, in a "timely and sobering" cautionary tale, New York Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews gives us Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. Andrews, a financial journalist, offers a "critical examination of the housing crisis" which "turned personal when...he got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house."
Dismantled
Jennifer McMahon. Harper, $24.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-168933-8
A prank gone wrong drives this outstanding novel from bestseller McMahon (Island of Lost Girls). The summer after graduation, four friends, who formed an art group called the Compassionate Dismantlers at Vermont’s Sexton College, live together in a remote cabin and commit increasingly brash acts of sabotage. When they go too far and their leader, Suz Pierce, dies, the group disbands, vowing never to speak about what happened. Ten years later, two of the group, Henry DeForge and Tess Kahle, are unhappily married with a nine-year-old daughter, Emma. When the suicide of a Sexton friend sends a PI digging into the past, Henry and Tess fear that the dead may not be truly buried. By alternating the present-day lives of Henry, Tess and Emma with the origins of the Dismantlers, McMahon allows the inexorable sense of dread to build incrementally. Perhaps most memorable are not the young artists but Emma, a child whose intense imagination only adds fuel to the slow-burning fire. (June)
Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
Edmund L. Andrews. Norton, $25.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-393-36794-1
“As I write in February 2009, I am four months past due on my mortgage and bracing for foreclosure proceedings to begin.” Thus begins this cautionary and critical examination of the housing crisis, a story that turned personal when New York Times economics reporter Andrews got caught up in the housing bubble after falling in love with a woman and a house. Bringing in $120,000 a year in salary—most of which went to child support and alimony to his ex-wife, Andrews says he was able to get a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mortgage with the assumption that his new wife, Patty, would be able to get a job to keep them afloat, an expectation that didn’t work out as planned. Because of his economics journalism background, Andrews says he “should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe,” and he castigates himself as well as fellow borrowers, the financial industry that took advantage of them and a government that didn’t put the brakes on the crisis that many economists warned about but that Alan Greenspan, the Bush administration and others ignored. This deeply personal exposé is timely and sobering in its candor. (June)
