Bug Hollow
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- € 6,49
Beschrijving uitgever
'I adored it' Claire Lombardo
'Feels like watching a master painter at work' Ann Napolitano
'I inhaled this book in a weekend' Leslie Jamison
Summer, California, 1970s.
Sally Samuelson is eight years old and the course of her family's life is about to change.
When her golden-boy brother Ellis, just graduated from high school, drives up the coast with his two best friends, he promises to be back in a week. But he does not return.
After Ellis's unexpected death, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis again - especially after Julia, Ellis's girlfriend, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.
And over the next four decades, the family fractures and rebuild, again and again - in a story that takes in love affairs, illnesses, late-in-life marriages and long-hidden secrets, and shows how brief intimate connections and heart-shattering losses can reverberate through generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Samuelson family stumbles through the extremes of love and loss in the intriguing if undercooked sixth novel from Huneven (Search). It begins in 1970s Northern California, when Ellis, a recent high school graduate, goes missing. He eventually returns, having taken a road trip with friends, but the episode's painful impact on his family proves to be a prelude for later grief. After Ellis accidentally drowns during his first semester at college, the tragedy serves as a catalyst for the other characters' life-altering decisions. Julia, Ellis's pregnant girlfriend, struggles to decide whether to take the pregnancy to term before arranging to have Ellis's parents adopt the baby, named Eva. Ellis's mother, Sybil, an elementary school teacher, drinks heavily and puts her work before her two younger daughters, overachieving Katie and artistic Sally, while their father, an architect, struggles to find a way forward. Later sections focus on the sisters in adulthood, as Katie leaves home to become a doctor while Sally helps raise Eva, now a young woman who tries to make sense of her family. Huneven succeeds at sketching the ways a family is shaped by trauma, but she maintains a fuzzy distance from the characters while shuttling through time, as if flipping through a yellowed photo album. This one leaves readers wanting more.
