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Published Jun 2023
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets—for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes.
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. 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. Now, years later, the siblings' lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he's determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his:children. 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. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.
Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out—its Edenic lushness and its snakes.
"With this intricate story, Brodeur reaches the heights scaled in her nonfiction work." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
:"A sensitive portrait of troubled lives." —Kirkus Reviews
"A compelling, earnest portrait of a family more fractured than its members realize… beautiful and heart-breaking." —Shelf Awareness
"Adrienne Brodeur knows her way around a family drama... 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... Set against the island's rippling dune grasses and scrub pines, [the] narrative is as elegantly rendered as it is compulsively readable." —Vogue
"I so admire the layered complexity of this beautiful novel about a flawed yet unforgettable family—the interlocking ironies and wounds and strivings for love and clarity and accomplishment and growth, all so deeply embedded in the lush natural world that is the Cape. Every character in this mesmerizing story is distinct and real, and I found myself rooting for them all."—Andre Dubus III, New York Times bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog
"Smart, funny and beautifully written. Brodeur is a brilliant dissector of family relationships, a lyricist of the natural world, and an astute observer of our inner turmoils." —Monica Ali, bestselling author of Love Marriage
"Wrenching, psychologically complex, and emotionally satisfying, Little Monsters is an immersive pleasure. This sprawling, big-hearted family saga is about the lies we tell each other and ourselves that enable us to maintain alliances—and what happens when we start telling the truth." —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Train
This information about Little Monsters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.
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