Nine Months

June 4, 2012
Cleverly’s suspenseful 10th Joe Sandilands mystery (after 2011’s The Blood Royal), set in 1933, makes the most of its intriguing setup. After Jackie Drummond, a nine-year pupil at St. Magnus School, in Seaford, defends a classmate from a bullying form master, Mr. Rapson, he’s sent to Rapson’s office for caning, but the brute fails to show up. On Jackie’s way back to his room, Rapson grabs Jackie, who pushes his attacker down the stairs in self-defense, with apparently fatal results. Jackie flees to London to seek help from unorthodox Scotland Yarder Sandilands, a friend of his parents, who are in India. Sandilands soon learns that a stabbing, not an accidental fall, was the real cause of Rapson’s death, but his efforts to get to the bottom of the matter draw the unexpected interest of some members of the government. The surprisingly horrific truth behind the murder helps to make this one of the better recent installments. Agent: Juliet Burton, Juliet Burton Agency.

June 11, 2012
Bomer’s debut novel (after the short story collection, Baby & Other Stories) is an interior account of one woman’s experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Sonia is an artist, or at least she was, until her full-time identity became that of wife and mother. Content with her kind and supportive husband, Dick, and her two young boys who are finally old enough to allow her to think about painting again, Sonia is plagued by the fear that the life she is living is smaller than the life she once imagined for herself. When she finds out she’s pregnant for a third time, these feelings of being trapped by her own nest are exacerbated, and Sonia is driven to one final journey of self-discovery. Sonia’s inner and outer turmoil is graphically rendered, and the novel is characterized by raw emotion and humanity that mirrors the wrenching experience of motherhood. Bomer revisits the same tropes of death and loss in childbirth that characterize her short fiction, with the same ability to appall. This is an alarmingly genuine account of the emotions that accompany that most primal act of giving birth and raising children.

May 1, 2012
A Brooklyn woman flips out when she discovers she's pregnant with her third child in this first novel by Bomer, whose previous short story collection (Baby and Other Stories, 2010) took a steely-eyed, unromantic view of motherhood. As the novel opens, Sonia is about to give birth to her third baby, alone in a hospital in Philadelphia. Flash back eight months. Sonia is a bourgeois yet hip (if that's not an oxymoron?) wife and mother who has put aside her ambitions as a painter for the time being in order to care for 4-year-old Tom and 2-year-old Michael. She doesn't have to work because husband Dick, a hazily drawn nice guy, earns a good living doing some kind of worthwhile research. Now that the boys are old enough for pre-school, Sonia is thinking about starting to paint again. And, no longer overwhelmed by the exhaustion of caring for small babies, she and Dick have rekindled their sexual relationship. The ironic result is Sonia's unexpected, unwanted pregnancy. Sonia has never been exactly in love with being a mommy, but she doesn't want the responsibility of choosing to terminate. Pregnancy only exaggerates a propensity toward self-absorption as she and Dick dither away the first trimester arguing but not deciding whether to abort. Meanwhile, Sonia 's ambivalence toward Brooklyn itself increases. She has diminishing patience with parenting peer pressure--the emphasis on nutrition, on finding the perfect school, on making sure one's child is properly diagnosed for trendy learning and social disorders. But, a Brooklyn cultural snob, she suffers a panic attack while house hunting in the suburbs. Finally, toward the end of her second trimester, Sonia snaps. Leaving the boys with long-suffering Dick, she heads off in her car. For the talky last trimester of the novel she revisits not only the people and places of her past, but also her pre-marriage persona to ready herself for permanent adulthood. Sonia is hard to care about, so her arguments pro and con baby-raising carry less weight than they should.

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August 1, 2012

Sonia, Brooklyn wife and mother of two, is shocked by an unexpected pregnancy, which comes just as she plans to revisit the artistic ambitions she set aside when her sons were born. In a hormone-induced panic Sonia abandons her family and sets out on a cross-country odyssey to rediscover her predomestic self. Fueled by desperation, she revisits different chapters of her life, pausing along the way to drink, smoke pot, and indulge in unprotected sex with a stranger at a truck stop. VERDICT Bomer, who previously lacerated the underbelly of family life in her short story collection Baby, has crafted a raw, darkly funny, at times appalling page-turner that rails against the sanctimonious culture of attachment parents, baby-wearers, and fervid breast feeders. Sonia is hard to like but genuine, both in her despair and in her flashes of affection for the family she's left behind. Mommy lit lovers will be horrified, but Bomer's debut novel will resonate with fans of quirky, character-driven fiction in the vein of Richard Russo, John Updike, and Tiffany Baker.--Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 24, 2012
Detective Joe Sandilands returns in this puzzling, haunting mystery, in which he investigates a death and multiple disappearances at a boarding school circa 1933. The kicker: the boy who tips him off to the case could in fact be his illegitimate son. As Sandilands, narrator Simon Prebble is charming yet stern. His British accent is perfect for this brooding tale. Prebble’s character interpretations are subtle, yet accurate and believable; his acting chops and colorful pallet of tones and voices are on display from the get go. Perfect for both young and old, this audio edition is an enjoyable ride. A Soho Crime hardcover.