Pat's Staff Picks

Damaged people inhabit this debut novel: people who have been struck by lightning as well as those who have lost loved ones from death, divorce, drinking, or duplicity. Young-Stone tells parallel stories that hurdle storm after storm headlong into one another. One follows the bullied Buckley R. Pitank, who watches as his beloved mother's life is buffeted by her mean-spirited mother and a fraud of an evangelical preacher. Just when she escapes and finds love, and Buckley sees the possibility of happiness, she is fatally struck by lightning. The other is the story of Becca Burke, a lightning strike survivor whose drunk mother and philandering father have a hard time believing that she has been repeatedly hit by lightning. As Buckley and Becca grow up, Buckley writes The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, excerpts of which begin each chapter, and Becca becomes a painter. What happens when they do finally meet is inevitable. Young-Stone is a very fine writer who has created a host of endearing losers—young, old, literate, and simple, all full of longing. What she does best is portray the incredulousness of the unlucky.

A guidance counselor is at a loss in her personal life in Mitchell's mediocre debut. Young widow Kate Cavanaugh has been going through the motions in the two years since her husband died of a heart attack. At work, she does her best with a cohort of troubled kids, but Kate is at sea when it comes to dealing with her own children: preschooler Hunter has an unhealthy emotional attachment to ketchup bottles, and teen Charlotte blames Kate for everything, including her dad's death. Despite the support of her next-door neighbor and the possibilities offered by a new romance, Kate decides the only way to fix her family is to hit the road with them, though nothing, of course, goes as planned. Mitchell's prose is sterling, but her character work is less than stellar; she doesn't do anything new with the tired trope of the rebellious teen seeking solace online, while adorable Hunter is just a sideshow. Mitchell tries admirably to do something different with familiar grief material, but the frenzied antics and haphazard character development undermine the effort.

A decades-old mystery is solved and a woman’s haunting questions put to rest in Pickard’s latest thriller. When she was just three years old, Jody Linder lost both parents in one night, when her father, Hugh Jay—eldest son of the wealthiest rancher in the small town of Rose, Kansas—was killed and her mother, Laurie, vanished. Raised by grandparents, Hugh Senior and Annabelle Linder, and with loving support from three uncles, Jody spends years collecting human detritus around the area’s towering Testament Rocks, where authorities once searched for clues to Laurie’s disappearance. Jody’s world is rocked 23 years later when Billy Crosby, the vicious drunk convicted of her father’s murder on circumstantial evidence, is released for a new trial; his return to town brings events to a head. In her second stand-alone (after The Virgin of Small Plains, 2006), Pickard shows her storytelling skills, weaving elements of deception, revenge, and romance into a novel with full-bodied characters who deal with tragedy as best they can; Annabelle Linder’s encounter with Crosby’s wife is particularly moving. From an award-winning author, this is engrossing fiction with an eminently satisfying denouement.