J. Robert Lennon

An hour later Harry and Chloe were on the road in Harry's Subaru, listening to country radio, which the girl had chosen. Rather than singing along, she was leaning over, concentrating on the lyrics. "The women are all warning each other about the men," she said. "But the men are all just proud of how American they are."

In this sequel to Hard Girls, Lila and Jane now have an equal partnership in their detective firm, although this has played out to mean Jane is doing routine surveillance work show more and has no idea what Lila is doing. She has arranged a local office for Jane to work out of, but it's a locksmith shop located in a defunct mall, not what Jane had had in mind. Still, they are both trying and when Jane proves more able to find information to help them locate a relative, Lila pulls her into the real business, unmasking the producer of a deadly street drug. Meanwhile, Jane's daughter, Chloe, is running for class president of her freshman class, but coming up against a faked video smearing her. She decides to handle it herself.

Lennon has created a wonderful family with complicated dynamics in the Pools, and it's worth following their development from the first book before reading this one. But if you have read it, you'll be happy to know that this installment is just as well-written, tightly plotted and fun as the first. He's still delving into the darker sides of the American dream; in this book he looks at anti-vaxers and far right militants, while keeping his focus on how people relate to each other. Lennon is perhaps better known for his surreal and intelligent fiction, but it's fun to see he's just as adept at writing genre fiction. show less

There's something great about reading a novel by an author you trust, isn't there? This book is by J. Robert Lennon, so I started off thinking that I was going to enjoy a wild ride that would surprise me a few times, and it turned out I was right. Jane is a mother in her mid-thirties, married and working as administrative assistance at the same college her father teaches at, which lets her keep an eye on him. She's worked hard to build this ordinary existence, and then a single email from show more her twin sister throws it all into the air. It all has to do with her mother, who disappeared decades ago and had not really been around much when Jane was a child and she and her sister developed [Harriet the Spy]-level skills to try to figure out what was going on with her. Moving back and forth from her childhood to her teen years to Jane's present day, the story is both a thriller with a lot going on and a nuanced look at the relationships between mothers and daughters. It looks like this is the first of a planned series and I will be reading every single one of them. show less

The opening pages of this book are narrated from the pov of a ghostly "observer" watching over a house in the middle of the woods in upstate New York. It is the middle of the night and suddenly chaos ensues: a man, woman and small child are grabbing a few things and rushing out the door to their car. They don't make it to the end of the driveway before the man and woman are shot and killed. The child escapes. There passes a period of 12 years as the Observer notes the decay of the house, and show more its occasional occupation by vagrants and teenage lovers.

Then the house is purchased and renovated and a new family moves in. Karl is a sculptor. His wife Eleanor is a successful writer of "chick-lit"--she "recognizes the essential frivolity of her work, but insists on approaching it with intelligence and a dedication to craft." Their daughter Irina is 12. They have moved to this rural setting from Brooklyn in an attempt to save their marriage which has suffered from Karl's multiple infidelities. Most of the rest of the book is told from the alternating viewpoints of one of these three main characters, with occasional interjections from the Observer, who functions as a kind of Greek chorus.

The focus is on family dynamics, but there is also an underlying crime/thriller element. The double homicide has never been solved. Unbeknownst to her parents, Irina becomes obsessed with the crime and participates in an online forum discussing the crime, Cyber Sleuths. And unknown to Irina, her mother Eleanor is also participating on the forum. Irina is focused on finding out what happened to the child who escaped, and when she meets a teenage girl in town, she convinces herself that this is that child. Through it all the ghostly observer "observes" and comments, and we see things from multiple points of view, and from a bird's eye view.

While it's mostly a quiet novel of a family disintegrating, it is also a psychological thriller, and the last third of the novel, as the crimes from the past begin to invade the present, were as exciting as any thriller I've read recently. It's extremely well-paced and I was compelled to keep turning the pages through-out. Amazon describes it as an "intelligent literary psychological thriller," and one reviewer compared it to a Coen Brothers film. I agree.

3 1/2 stars

First line: "It is a few minutes past one in the morning when the front door slams shut."

Last line: "She chants faster and faster, until she can't take it anymore, and then she laughs until she can barely breathe." show less

Imagine driving along the highway, when the familiar crack in the windshield of your car suddenly disappears. You refocus on the road only to realize everything is different. Everything. Your car, your clothes, even you. Beside you is a folder from a conference you don't remember attending.

Elisa's day is not going well. She decides she has no choice but to follow the road home. Her husband, Derek, is still listed in her phone.

"The mailbox is the same and the driveway she pulls into is the show more same. But the house is not.

"It is white, for one thing. It's supposed to be a pale yellow-gray. It had been white when they bought it, but they changed it. The rhododendrons are gone, replaced by a row of sculpted yews. Or rather the yews they tore out a few years ago are still there. The grass, to which she had always been indifferent, is healthy and trim, and the pink dogwood, the one that had seemed certain to die but then rallied and came back to life, that dogwood is gone and in its place stands a Japanese maple."

This is Elisa's story. But it is not just a story of alternative universes. It is a poignant look at a dysfunctional family, a marriage on the rocks. And the funny thing is that the author never intended to go there!

"The crazy thing is, I didn't want to write about parenthood. At all.... I'd envisioned Familiar as an oblique, rather detached, bit of literary sci-fi, something spare and enigmatic....It wasn't until draft three that I fully accepted that I was writing a novel about the psychological effects of parenthood....Elisa Brown is given a second chance, and her reaction, at least at first, is to long, terribly, for the tragic life she left behind. We are invested in our illusions--I wanted to explore what might happen if this particular one were stripped away."

Loved this book! show less