Review by Booklist Review
The only person who seems to "get" seven-year-old Viola on the day of her mother's funeral is an unfamiliar young man who treats her as an adult, not a grieving child. Meanwhile, Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, finds the solace he craves in their aunt's unceremonious hijinks. Even with their divergent approaches to emotional devastation, nothing can shake the fundamental core of Viola and Sebastian's sibling relationship, forged by the reality of an absentee mother and an emotionally distant father. As children, teens, and young adults, Viola and Sebastian operate as a team until Sebastian's obsession with his mother's career as an actress on a popular daytime drama coincides with Viola's furtive affair with the actor who was her mother's closest friend. Fallon's striking debut delineates the whipsaw nature of duality. In chapters that move back and forth in time, the twins' closeness withers when conflicts expose their individual natures, while their mother struggles with juggling the demands of being a wife and mother and a successful, sexy actress. Everyone reels with the uncertainty of preparing for the future while being haunted by the past. Assured in her craftsmanship, radiant in her compassionate characterizations, Fallon invites comparisons to Ann Patchett, Ann Napolitano, and Anne Tyler.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Fallon debuts with an aptly titled domestic drama/coming-of-age novel in which teens uncover their parents' past lives and parents come to terms with their children's search for answers. It begins in 1983, when a young Harvard historian named Al Bliss meets 21-year-old actor Susan Byrne during a reenactment of the Salem witch trials. Romance blooms between them, and marriage quickly follows. Al climbs the tenure ladder in Cambridge, while Susan travels to Hollywood to act in a daytime-television drama. She becomes pregnant with twins and gives up her acting career for a year, then returns to spending weekdays in Hollywood and weekends at home with the twins, Sebastian and Viola. Susan dies from cancer when the twins are seven years old, and her children grow up knowing little of their mother's life, until a teenaged Sebastian learns from his maternal aunt, Sadie, that Susan had been an actor. When Sebastian hears that his father destroyed all evidence of Susan's career, their relationship grows fraught. Sebastian and Viola begin to explore their mother's life before they came along, while the novel examines their shifting relationships, showing how the twins mature and, each in their own way, peel back the layers of their parents' histories. VERDICT Fallon's debut intertwines the lives of the members of the Bliss family, unwrapping how Al and his children seek closure years after Susan's death. Recommended for readers who enjoy contemporary family sagas.--Joyce Sparrow
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A novel with an unusual timeline, one that teeters between a woman's determination to have an acting career in the 1980s and her small family's future difficulties. Once, women in Salem, Massachusetts, were tried and convicted as witches due to their supposedly superhuman abilities. Bewitchingly beautiful Susan Byrne plays one of the Salem witches at a local museum for an agonizingly long three years as she waits for a break that will get her to stardom. Before that break arrives, she meets tenure-track historian Alcott Bliss; they fall in love and marry, and Susan agrees to remain in his beloved Boston environs. Perhaps playing an alleged witch affected her more than she realized, as Susan seems superhuman when she lands a recurring role on a long-running daytime soap opera and begins an arduous weekly commute between coasts--even after the young couple agrees to start a family. As scenes of their twins, Sebastian and Viola, years later alternate with scenes of Susan and Al's increasingly strained relationship, it seems something has to give. Readers will know what that something is from the opening chapter set during Susan's funeral when the twins are 7, but the expert shuffle between the two time periods will keep them invested in the familial sleight of hand so many will practice in the early years of parenthood. The dealer's-choice structure allows Seb and Lola to reach adulthood without feeling tethered in roles as progeny; they love and hate their parents in differing amounts at different times, while remaining individuals capable of real achievements and heartbreaking mistakes. The contrast of Susan's foreshortened career with her best friend Orson Grey's ascending stardom might be employed in one plot twist too far, yet this bit of business serves to underline one of the kid's mistakes. In the end, like the soap opera Susan stars in, this drama allows readers to "dissolve; feel your own problems grow trivial against the melodrama, against the height of what a human can feel." The author's emotional intelligence shines through in this affecting novel's quirky, evolving characters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
