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Pulitzer Prize finalist Makkai (The Great Believers) knows whereof she writes; she lives on the campus of the boarding school she attended as a teenager, where her husband now teaches and her child is a student. Her lifelong, three-pronged immersion in that culture has resulted in a thought-provoking and delicious tale of life and death and justice that very well may have gone sideways.
Makkai's sweeping fourth novel (after Music for Wartime) shows the compassion of chosen families and the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones. This should strike a chord with the Gen Xers who came of age, and then aged, in these tumultuous years. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]
Themes of guilt, loss, survival, and memory infuse the entire book, which is rife with sentences that will stop you in your tracks with their strangeness and profundity.
This novel is stunning: ambitious, readable, and intriguing. Its gothic elements, complexity, and plot twists are reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Chilling and thoroughly enjoyable. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/14.]