LoveReading Says
Set during one seminal summer in Cape Cod against the backdrop of the 2016 US presidential election, Adrienne Brodeur's Little Monsters dissects the secrets and emotional traumas of a dysfunctional family to gripping effect. Driven by complex, troubled characters, it’s a compelling story for fans of family dramas that pack emotional punch.
Adam, an oceanographer patriarch, is about to reach his seventieth birthday after raising his kids as a single dad — his wife died shortly after giving birth to his now-38-year-old daughter. From the off, Adam is established as a conundrum of a character. Far from being entirely likeable, he’s certainly intriguing. Grappling with his mortality, Adam decides to stop taking meds for his bipolar disorder in the hope that will help him bring a huge scientific breakthrough to fruition.
Similarly, Adam’s son Ken is hardly a likeable chap. An aspiring Republican politician and extremely wealthy businessman who’d “just joined the ranks of men who owned the world and could buy whatever they wanted”, Ken presents himself to the world as being 100% self-assured. He also seems utterly devoid of empathy, especially when it comes to his sister Abby. She’s an artist who works in her mother’s former “glorious and free studio space in the dunes”, which is technically now owned by Ken. Pregnant at 38, “for the first time in decades, she was hungry. Instead of wanting to disappear, Abby wanted to be seen.”
As tension between Ken and Abby prickles, as Adam becomes increasingly frenzied, a stranger enters their life. With everyone harbouring secrets, the stage is set for a pulse-quickening public showdown and personal revolutions.
Joanne Owen
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Little Monsters Synopsis
A riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families and long-buried secrets
Ken and Abby Gardner were raised in a remote home on Cape Cod. As adults, their relationship is strained, but their lives are still deeply intertwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family, but when his wife walks in on him in an internet chatroom, she demands they go to therapy. Abby is a talented artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them as a single parent. As his seventieth birthday approaches and he begins to stare down his mortality, he comes off his bipolar disorder medication in order to make one last scienti?c breakthrough; he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children.
Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harbouring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family - Steph, who doesn't make her connection known.
Set over one fraught summer, 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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781529153798 |
| Publication date: |
11th July 2023 |
| Author: |
Adrienne Brodeur |
| Publisher: |
Hutchinson Heinemann an imprint of Cornerstone |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
416 pages |
| Primary Genre |
General Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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Adrienne Brodeur Press Reviews
Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn't put it down. Adrienne Brodeur does family intrigue and dysfunction like no one else I know. In Little Monsters, she once again draws back the curtain on a world of seaside wealth and casual privilege, to reveal a family unravelled by the lies, rivalries, secrets, and silences that have bound it together -- Ruth Ozeki
Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished, Adrienne Brodeur's Little Monsters delivers its powerful emotional punches so subtly that they sneak up on you and leave you floored -- Miranda Cowley Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace
Gorgeously told, with psychological nuance to spare, Adrienne Brodeur's latest fiction returns us to a world she knows by heart, wind-blown, wave-swept Cape Cod and the fraught, labyrinthine territory beneath the surface of family. This is the work of a seasoned and wonderfully wise storyteller. Brodeur is as masterfully attuned to the complex DNA of kindred secrets and high-risk loyalties as she is empathetic to the specifically tangled lives of the Gardner clan. We ultimately want for them what we want for ourselves, the freedom that comes with hard-won healing and truth telling, and the intimacy that waits if we're brave enough to look back down the loaded barrel of love -- Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark
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
Who understands complicated family dynamics better than Adrienne Brodeur? Little Monsters is a gripping portrait of how we carry the past into the present, and how the boundaries of kinship blur and change over time -- Mary Beth Keane, author of ASK AGAIN, YES
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
In Little Monsters, Adrienne Brodeur plunges into a multi-charactered family novel that is richly satisfying, like the best of meals, taking the reader into the heart of what Freud called 'the family romance,' with all its complexities, evasions, buried guilts, forbidden passions and sibling rivalry. As sharply observant about her characters as she is of the landscape and seascape of Cape Cod, where they live, her novel is that rarest of things: a truly great read -- Michael Korda
An utterly gripping, immersive story of one family's unravelling traumas and hopes. It will capture and hold you in its depths. Brodeur creates characters who are so real, so complex, I could almost touch them, feel them sitting beside me -- Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo
