Consent A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Sara is a successful ethics professor, spending her money on lavish perfumes and designer clothing. But behind this façade, she carries a heavy burden. After her mother's death, she cares for her adult sister, who is unable to live alone. Across town, Saskia is a promising PhD student and the pride of her family, a stark contrast to her twin sister, whose erratic ideas and chaotic behavior Saskia struggled to keep up with. Although their circumstances differ, each woman strives for independence and an identity separate from her family. When tragedy suddenly strikes, both find themselves lost and haunted. Sara turns to alcohol to cope, while Saskia hires a private detective for answers. An unsettling connection is uncovered that forever binds the two, and a plan for revenge unfolds as they take justice into their own hands. Lyon (The Sweet Girl, 2013) explores how death often leaves unanswered questions about even those we love the most. Consent unfolds within the shadows of grief, love, and regret, revealing how to find peace when death forever changes life.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The lives of two pairs of sisters from Vancouver intersect in Lyon's intense, intimate novel of love, grief, and murder (after The Sweet Girl). After 30-something Sara Landow's mother dies in 2011, Sara assumes responsibility for her intellectually disabled younger sister, Mattie. A month later, when Sara returns from a short trip, Mattie has married their late mother's handyman, Robert Dwyer. While Mattie had never been declared legally incompetent, Sara doubts she is capable of consenting to marriage, and tries to have it annulled. In 2015, the lives of 27-year-old twins Saskia and Jenny Gilbert are derailed when a car accident leaves Jenny in a coma. While Jenny is still unconscious in the hospital, a man is caught masturbating in her room. As Saskia, disturbed by the news, learns about Jenny's practice of BDSM, Lyon alternates back to Sara as she grieves in the aftermath of Mattie's death from a fall for which Robert was present, a few years after they married. When Sara and Saskia eventually meet, they process their sisters' disturbing relationships. While the circumstances leading to the women's connection are not entirely surprising, their reactions ramp up the novel toward a deliciously dark conclusion. Lyon's mesmerizing novel perfectly captures the odd mix of love and resentment faced by caregivers. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Two pairs of Canadian sisters, living somewhat parallel lives, are on a collision course after separate tragedies derail them. Sara's younger sister, Mattie, has significant mental deficits that have demanded all their parents' attention. Sara escapes to college to pursue her interest in high fashion until the death of their surviving parent requires her to return home to care for Mattie. When Robert, a handyman with a shady past, marries Mattie while Sara is away, Sara takes legal action to keep them apart, with terrible consequences for Mattie. Meanwhile, twins Saskia and Jenny live completely opposite lives. While their wealthy parents are laser-focused on keeping wild, party-girl Jenny out of trouble, Saskia escapes into a dense intellectual life in academia. Then Jenny is left in a coma after a car accident, and responsibility for her medical care falls on Saskia, who must make an impossible choice. A search for answers into Jenny's last moments leads Saskia to contact Sara for a deeper understanding of the tie that binds them, drawing the two women into a deadly dance of need and dark psychology. VERDICT Prolific author Lyon, who achieved international success with her first novel, 2010's The Golden Mean, is on track for more acclaim with this suspenseful, seamlessly constructed novel of intricately mingled lives. It's already been long-listed for Canada's prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two pairs of sisters share a similar dynamic--and a tragically intertwined fate. After Lyon made her debut with a well-received historical novel about Aristotle (The Golden Mean, 2010) and followed it with a sequel (The Sweet Girl, 2013), her third adult novel is a complete departure, set largely in present-day Vancouver. Sara is a sophisticated intellectual who shops for designer clothes and expensive perfume in Paris; she considers her hometown a bit of a backwater. But after her mother's death, Sara's travels are curtailed, as the care of her developmentally disabled younger sister, Mattie, is now in her hands. Though she's not paying close enough attention to prevent the beautiful Mattie from getting married to their late mother's handyman, as soon as she finds out about the marriage, she swings into action to have it annulled. In a parallel storyline, Saskia and Jenny are a pair of twins who are as different as Sara and Mattie. Saskia is the smart one, Jenny the wild one. And like Sara's, Saskia's prospects will ultimately be constrained by her sisterly responsibilities. Following two similar stories with similarly named characters can be a challenge, and between that and the amount of contrivance and tragedy required to bring the storylines together, Lyon's novel bogs down. The most enjoyable aspects of the book have little to do with the plot and are mostly Sara's--scenes in dress shops and perfume stores, her thoughts about the plots of a fictional memoir and a fictional TV show, her fantasy of an imaginary alternate life. "In her mind she lives alone, somewhere old and elegantly seedy: Lisbon, Venice, or some old Caribbean port where the sun dawns pinkly and the trade winds cool the veranda in the evening…she drinks at dusk and writes on a vintage pink typewriter before that…." Instead, she's stuck in this B-movie melodrama. An ultrabusy plot overwhelms elegant writing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1977 The baby doesn't cry but Sara's mother cries. Everyone is tired and Sara is tired of playing nicely in the plash of sun on the carpet, the dust motes turning, while her mother feeds the baby and rocks the baby and mum­bles into the phone, the swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Sara misses the crook of her mother's arm and the smell of her, the honey-wood smell that comes from the faceted glass bottle on her dresser. She doesn't like the milk smell on her mother or the milk-shit smell on her sister. Visitors wear brave watery smiles, and try to elicit brave watery smiles from Sara's mother. Something about the baby and the baby's placidity, Sara gathers, is not quite right. The baby is too quiet, the baby sleeps too much. People are gentle and kind and hand the baby back quickly to her mother, who does not rush to take her. They bring big gifts for the baby and small gifts for Sara, which is unfair and absurd and makes Sara impa­tient. Sticker sheets and socks and little books that she is encouraged to read to the baby, which is unfair. Sara can't read. She has to turn the pages by herself in the plash of sunlight, the dust motes spinning endlessly, because her mother cannot. She just cannot read to her right now. When Sara's father comes home, Sara's mother goes to bed. Then her father holds the baby in the crook of his arm and scrambles Sara's eggs with one hand. He reads the new books with her and puts the baby on the floor more than Sara's mother does so he can play with Sara. She appreciates this. He smells sourer than her mother, and his cheek is rough. She doesn't want to shift allegiances, not really, but what choice does she have? A chokingly sweet-smelling older woman comes to visit. Sara's great-aunt. That sounds very grand. She brings another pink bear for the baby but a big gift for Sara: a Barbie doll and a child's suitcase filled with clothes. Some of them are the cheap things that came with the doll, plastic netting crinolines and pink pretend silk dresses and white plastic shoes that snap onto her feet. But some were hand-sewn by the great-aunt herself for some distant child who is grown up now. Real silk, real velvet, real wool, even real fur: scraps from real fab­rics used to make real clothes. The stitches are tiny, like an elf would make. Fur-trimmed hooded capes, rickrack edged gowns, little two-piece suits, a tiny bouclé pea­coat. Sara sits in her plash of sunlight, turning the little clothes this way and that, dressing and undressing the Barbie. She is a very good girl. "That scent is roses," her mother tells her once the great-aunt has left. The difference between roses and her mother's honey-wood fascinates her. She sniffs back and forth from the doll's clothes to her mother's sleeve, again and again, trying to recapture the bursting sur­prise of a beautiful thing that has nothing of her mother in it. The next day her father brings her a little bottle of scent for her own self from the drugstore because her mother asked him to. Then she loves her mother again. 1998 You're not the boss of me, they used to tell each other as children. Saskia and Jenny, Jenny and Saskia. Same size, same face, same stubbornness. Their own father couldn't reliably tell them apart until they were five. You're not the boss of me. "Yes, twins," their mother would tell strangers who stopped to admire their dark eyes, their curls. Their mother was always smiling tiredly. She wasn't the boss, either, though she knew them better than their father. Knew them well enough that when she sat on the sofa as the afternoon light drained away, and Jenny would say, "Jenny's upstairs, Jenny's hurt," their mother would sip from her glass without looking at her and say, "That's very funny. Nice try." "Really, I'm Saskia," Jenny would say. "I'm resting, okay?" their mother would say. "Try to understand." "She didn't fall for it," Jenny would tell Saskia upstairs, where she lay on the bed, pretending to be Jenny. Saskia had known she wouldn't fall for it, but it was easier to let Jenny play her games. "What do you want to do now?" Jenny would say, jumping up. "I know! Let's try on her clothes. We can put music on and dress up and pretend to--" "I want to read." "That's boring. Play with me. You have to play with me or I'll set your book on fire." She would, too, in the bathroom sink, with the bar­beque lighter. She had got a spanking last time, but it would not deter her from doing it again. Only Saskia could save her, by giving in. That was her one power. Still: "You're not the boss of me!" A lie. Jenny always got what she wanted, always. She could twist Saskia into any trouble she wanted. Jenny's eyes sparkled. Saskia was serious. That was how you told them apart. Excerpted from Consent: A Novel by Annabel Lyon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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