Mary McGarry Morris, Author Viking Books $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-670-89156-6
Small towns are never as ordinary as they seem; everyone has secrets. In her well-received novels (A Dangerous Woman, etc.), Morris has honed this territory with empathy for those on the fringes of community life. Here she raises the stakes: it's the best families in town that have the most to lose, and thus to hide. Fiona Range is the black sheep of the Hollis clan, residents of Dearborn, Mass. When her unwed mother abandoned her as a baby, Fiona was raised by her aunt and uncle. Headstrong and reckless, she has always felt like an outsider. At 30, she has never attended college, held a good job or had a relationship with a good man. She's now waiting tables, drinking, satisfying her need for intimacy by sleeping around, and despairing about her future. Then her cousin Elizabeth returns from New York with a physician fianc , an event that devastates Elizabeth's hometown boyfriend. Fiona becomes sexually involved with both men, a fact not lost on anyone. Meanwhile, she's determined to achieve a relationship with badly scarred Vietnam vet Patrick Grady, who everyone says is her father, though he vehemently denies paternity. The reader catches on far earlier than Fiona that her uncle's warnings about Patrick's violence hide a secret of his own, and that his vaunted charity to Patrick and others is hush money. The plot seems to go in circles as Fiona ignores common sense and repeatedly behaves rashly, afterward suffering guilt and self-disgust. In fact, Fiona's headlong self-destruction distance her from the reader's sympathy. Yet there is sustained tension in the narrative, and the denouement packs a thriller's excitement. Agent, Jean Naggar. BOMC selection. (May) FYI: Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah Book Club selection.
As she proved in her first novel, Vanished, and in the equally compelling A Dangerous Woman, Morris can depict society's outsiders-people with bleak presents and no futures-with rare understanding Continue reading »
This second novel corroborates the remarkable talent McGarry displayed in Vanished , her stunning story of a child kidnapped by two misfits. Here again her protagonist is a woman who is not Continue reading »
Keeping secrets leads to calamitous consequences in Morris’s disturbing domestic thriller. At age 17, Nora Trimble has a dangerous eight-day summer escapade with psycho boyfriend Eddie Continue reading »
In her latest, Morris (Songs in Ordinary Time) offers a timeless and timely look at small town life, as seen by wise, verbose, and intensely naïve thirteen-year-old heroine Nellie Peck. Set in the Continue reading »
In Morris's ``strong and painful'' first novel, Aubrey Wallace, a simple, good-hearted laborer on a Vermont road crew, falls for Dotty--cute, tarty, amoral and utterly freaked-out--who lures him away Continue reading »
"They said it was bad for everyone, but nobody else the boy knew had to live in the woods." Thus begins the harrowing story of 12-year-old Thomas and eight-year-old Margaret in Continue reading »
What happens when a 43-year-old man returns to live in his hometown after serving a 25-year prison sentence for murder? That is the dramatic question at the center of this fifth novel by Morris Continue reading »
In Morris's strong and painful first novel Aubrey Wallace, a simple, goodhearted laborer on a Vermont road crew, thinks the frail girl who beckons to him from a wooded stream looks like a picture Continue reading »
A quartet of artists negotiate love, ambition, and politics during the 2011 Occupy movement in Angress’s winning debut. Nineteen-year-old Louisa Arceneaux is a new transfer Continue reading »
Thuận, in her English-language debut, delivers a powerful examination of a woman’s remembering and forgetting. In 2004, an unnamed Vietnamese woman and her son are stuck on a Continue reading »
Stott follows up the memoir In the Days of Rain with an impressive narrative set in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. By 500 CE, the Romans have abandoned Britain, their city Continue reading »
Jin (Little Gods) returns with a provocative magical realist collection in which women fall in love, grieve, and figure out what to make of their lives amid constant changes. Continue reading »