Review by Booklist Review
Established novelist Zigman has crafted a tender story of two sisters who, both in midlife and both recently divorced, move in together. Small World chronicles Joyce and Lydia's reconnection while simultaneously painting a picture of a family that was broken by the loss of a third sister: Eleanor, who was developmentally and physically disabled and died when the three girls were young. Zigman deftly moves between family time lines, sharing glimmers of the girls' painful upbringing alongside their present-day renavigation of life as divorcées, housemates, and sisters. Woven between these narratives are artifacts of Joyce's secret obsession: turning posts from the Nextdooresque neighborhood social-media site Small World into prose poems. Ranging from deeply devastating to extremely funny, these poems add another poignant and reflective layer to a moving story about the power of family secrets, sisterhood, and memory. Readers of authors such as Jodi Picoult, Barbara Kingsolver, or Kristin Hannah will be affected by Zigman's skillful and sensitive chronicling of a sisterhood simultaneously affected by the past and finding a new future.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Zigman's entrancing and thorny latest (after Separation Anxiety), two sisters confront the childhood death of their middle sister. After living in Los Angeles for 30 years, Lydia Mellishman moves in with her younger sister, Joyce, in Cambridge, Mass. Both women are divorced and childless, and are hopeful that rooming together will mean they can finally develop a bond. Lydia, however, remains her old bristly self: she's rude and inconsiderate of Joyce's feelings, especially after Lydia befriends their new neighbors Sonia and Stan, who disrupt Joyce's life with the noise of their illegal yoga studio. As the narrative flits between the present and the sisters' childhood, it becomes clear that their dynamic is fueled by having been neglected as children by their mother, Louise. Despite Joyce's stutter and Lydia's dyslexia, Louise directed her attention toward their sister Eleanor, who had cerebral palsy and died from the flu when she was 10. Later, Louise continued focusing on advocacy work for children with special needs. After Joyce's job as an archivist leads her to someone from Louise's circle, Lydia shares a secret, and the sisters find an opportunity for reckoning. Zigman does a stellar job of creating well-rounded characters, and a satisfying ending tops off her well-crafted paean to sisterhood. Readers will love this. Agent: Stephanie Rostan, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two adult siblings move in together and struggle to come to terms with the long-ago loss of their disabled sister and their own troubled relationship. Like most siblings, the middle-aged Mellishman sisters at the heart of Zigman's amusing yet poignant new novel have chapters of history propping them up and weighing them down. Newly divorced Joyce, an archivist in Cambridge, is getting used to solitude again, whiling away her time on a neighborhood site called Small World, turning her neighbors' queries and complaints into strange but potent poetry. The act, she says, is therapeutic--and also easier than addressing the nagging questions about her own life. When Lydia, her older sister, leaves LA for the East Coast, Joyce invites her to move in for a while, secretly hoping proximity will force them to forge a bond they never quite managed to build. But they still can't seem to communicate or talk about their past. Their childhoods were laser-focused on Eleanor, their severely disabled sister, who died at 10. But although Eleanor's life was short, her impact was lasting, especially on her sisters, who learned to hide their own fears and problems in order to focus on hers. Zigman, who excels at depicting the emotional push and pull of sibling relationships, examines the conflicts and grief that play out in a family dealing with a disabled child with compassion and honesty. Yet she never loses her sharp sense of humor, as evidenced by the hilarious ongoing war between Joyce and her new upstairs neighbors, who seem to be running a yoga studio. As she reveals secrets previously unknown to Joyce, Zigman doesn't shy away from discussing the hardships the Mellishmans faced, but she also highlights small moments of wonder and joy that illuminate the sisters' shared path. The world might feel small, Joyce learns, but the power of hope always looms large. A compassionate, often funny examination of shared family grief and love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
