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Worried Winnie – She is a little girl who worries about everything, especially about what is going to happen to her or the entire world. As the Goodreads synopsis notes you can also tell how very familiar our author is with the setting, feeling as if you are there.
One moment, you’re studying the white-pink sand below; the next, you’re over a blue-black abyss and staring into darkness. The landscape, the marshes and the ponds, the whales beneath the surface of the ocean are all weaved into the tapestry of this incredibly moving portrait of a fractured family. Adam’s 70th birthday party is the central event of the novel, an occasion when his son, Ken, an arrogant real estate developer with political ambitions, and his daughter, Abby, an artist just becoming recognized, will present him with gifts they hope will elicit the praise and admiration they desperately covet. With clear allusions to the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, this is a narrative that I highly recommend you experience for yourself. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated—and as adults their relationship is strained.I didn’t start writing Little Monsters until the spring of 2020, but I always knew I would set the book in the months leading up to the 2016 election as I found the uneasy mood of the country riveting. Raising Ken and Abby on his own after his wife’s death, Adam was a difficult father, distracted by grandiose professional ambitions, undermined by his mental illness. Determined to conduct himself as a model patient, Adam drove himself straight to the pharmacy to pick up his medications. Pine needles had gathered between the slats of his large wooden deck, and Adam contemplated giving it a sweep but instead sank into the Adirondack chair facing the pond.
Brodeur has indeed crafted a consummate summer read with “Little Monsters,” which somehow evokes smooth beach glass and hot pink sunsets with nary a mention of either. She “couldn’t pinpoint a date, but over the last few years, the distance between the three of them had turned into something more palpable, a liquid congealing into a solid. The voices in his head, which had been passing through for several weeks, seemed to have taken up permanent residency. Bipolar Adam is spinning from “I have one more discovery left” to depression leading up to his 70th birthday bash.Little Monsters achieves a sense of momentum and pacing through a ticking clock counting down the months to a large event.
The prose of this novel is alive with the sounds, smells, and sights of the rugged outer Cape, and you don’t have to be the least bit familiar with the area to be transfixed. Brodeur weaves a story dense with stinging secrets and simmering resentments, rooted in another context that she knows well: the manicured towns and wild fringes of Cape Cod. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. The people surrounding Abby and Ken have their own stakes in the intricacies of this family, and their own secrets, too. Also set on Cape Cod and also about a dysfunctional family’s reckoning, “Wild Game” is a nonstop parade of I can’t believe this moments whose power is partly derived from the fact that those moments really happened.This family is so good at keeping secrets from one another and pretending they know each other so well that as the cracks continue to widen between them, a surprise none of them anticipates is lurking right around the corner.
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