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We all have that one friend or family member who just seemed to disappear. Whether it’s a childhood friend who ditched your group, an ostracized sibling, or a person you just can’t seem to understand anymore, they remind us of how tenuous our social connections are. The three new novels in this week’s book club are all about the mystery and sorrow of moving on to something new. They examine the ties we have to others, and the way we stretch, bend, and cut them.
<em>The Queens of Innis Lear</em>
King Lear is an epic and familiar story. It’s the tale of a ruler felled by age and ego, who listens to empty flattery and disinherits his only truly loyal child, only to face the karmic consequences. There’s a reason it has been told many times over hundreds of years; its themes resonate when we think about our leaders and the many families we’ve seen torn apart by greed. Gratton gives Lear a new spin, turning it into a fantasy novel about warring potential queens.
<em>The Gunners</em>
“As children, The Gunners could not have imagined that by the time they were sixteen years old, one of them would turn her back on the others, and the group would be so fractured by the loss, the sudden and unexplained absence of this one, that within weeks the other friendships would also dissolve, leaving each of them in a dark and confounding solitude. Mikey Callahan became a sink hole; everything inside sort of loosened and then just collapsed.” Kauffman’s second novel (her first was the critically praised Another Place You’ve Never Been) opens with six-year-old Mikey discovering for the first time that most people have two eyes that work, instead of just one.
<em>The Baby Plan</em>
33-year-old Nathalie Kneller is relatively close with her younger half-sister, 24-year-old Lyndi. She grew up with her and her mother, Kathy, after Nathalie’s mother died when Nathalie was young and her father remarried the family friend. Nathalie has been trying for some time to have a baby, and she’s finally pregnant and ready to tell her family, hosting Thanksgiving for the first time with an announcement she’s been composing for three years… but before she can deliver it, Lyndi throws up, scooping her news and her condition. (And the worst part is, Nathalie made the mashed potatoes that caused it.)
