Bug Hollow
A Novel
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4.0 • 41개의 평가
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- US$13.99
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“Perfectly captures the unpredictability of life . . . Right down to its final moments, Huneven casually offers up little revelations that crunch as sweet and tart as pomegranate seeds.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Instantly seduces even the most news-addled reader with its lovely, lucid prose, its spot-on period details and superb gift for description . . . Huneven remains a compassionate guide through the secrets and lies, betrayals and chance encounters, losses and disappointments that buffet this broken and remade family over time." —Helen Schulman, New York Times Book Review
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and Oprah Daily
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after one event changes their lives forever
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
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.
