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Summary
Summary
On the morning of her seventieth birthday, Georgianna Grove receives an unexpected letter that calls her back to Missing Lake, Wisconsin, where her mother was murdered sixty-six years earlier. Georgie's father had confessed to the murder the next morning and was carted off to a state penitentiary. Haunted by the night that took both her parents away and determined to unearth the truth, Georgie takes her reluctant family on what will become a dangerous canoe trip up the swollen Bone River to return to Missing Lake.
Acclaimed novelist Susan Richards Shreve, celebrated for her "refined explorations of parent-child relationships" (Washington Post), captures the tenor of the times with clarity and elegance as she follows both Georgie and her parents on parallel trips up the Bone River, weaving together the hope of June 2008 with the injustices of June 1941. Georgie must untangle a web of bigotry, loss, and half-forgotten memories to finally understand her parents' fate.
More News Tomorrow is a stirring and irresistible portrait of a family drawn together in search of truth.
Author Notes
Susan Richards Shreve is the author of twelve novels and a number of books for children.
She is a professor at George Mason University and the president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
She lives in Washington, D. C.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Shreve (You Are the Love of My Life) is a stirring tale of an elderly woman seeking the truth about her mother's six-decade old murder in Missing Lake, Wis. In 1941, Georgie Grove's mother was found strangled; her father confessed to the murder the following day. In 2007, on her 70th birthday, Georgie receives a letter from Roosevelt McCrary, an 11-year-old boy at the time of the crime who has a connection to Georgie's family. Roosevelt still lives in the area where the crime happened and asks Georgie if she'd like to meet. Georgie plans the trip to Missing Lake to investigate, to the delight of her 13-year-old grandson, Thomas, a fledgling writer. The rest of her family agree to go along on the mission, including her son, Nicolas, daughters Rosie and Venus, grandson Jesse, and four-year-old granddaughter, Oona. But the trajectory of the fact-finding trip shifts after Oona goes missing. The story is excellently balanced between Georgie's internal thoughts and the search for the truth behind her mother's death. Shreve's fans will be captivated by the complex narrative of families, secrets, and lies. (June)
Kirkus Review
Dead parents haunt Shreve's 16th novel (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012, etc.).In 2007, George Washington University professor Georgianna Grove still grapples with the mysterious tragedy that orphaned her as a small child. In 1941, when Georgianna was 4, her father, William, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, went to prison for murdering her mother on a canoe trip to the Wisconsin summer camp he ran. Four years later, William died in prison, leaving Georgianna to face a lonely childhood with unapproachable, anti-Semitic maternal grandparents. In reaction, Georgianna made the concept of "home" central to her research as an anthropologist and has continually welcomed strangers into the house where she raised her own three children. They'd become fatherless themselves at ages 4, 2, and still-in-the-womb when Georgianna's husband died in Vietnam. On her 70th birthday, Georgianna receives a letter from the only other person from the 1941 canoe trip who's still alive. At the time, Roosevelt McCrary was an 11-year-old child who had been hired, along with his mother, to work at the camp despite being black. As an adult, Roosevelt became a part owner of the camp and has retired there. Hoping he has information to exonerate William, Georgianna decides to revisit the camp and nearby murder site for the first time. She drags along her familygrown children Venus, Rosie, and Nicolas, whose work on Barack Obama's campaign hovers in the background; Rosie's 13-year-old son, Thomas, in the throes of grieving his own father's recent death; Nicolas' son, 15-year-old Jesse, and 4-year-old daughter, Oona, coincidentally Georgianna's age in 1941. Georgianna discovers that her parents' lives and deaths were more complex and mysterious than she thought and not truly knowable. Shreve creates a spooky atmosphere with stormy weather, eerie parallels between past and present, and at least one threateningly crazy woman. Even spookier is the backdrop of 20th-century racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigration feeling that are all too familiar today.Part gothic novel, part adventure story, but primarily a meditation on surmounting misfortunes that may lie beyond an individual's control. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When Georgianna Grove, a 70-year-old professor of anthropology, plans a family trip from Washington, D.C., to Lake Minnie Ha-Ha in northern Wisconsin, it is not intended to be a cheerful, bonding vacation with campfires and canoes. Georgie's mother was murdered there when Georgie was four, and her father is the confessed killer. Nine others were at the campsite six decades ago, and now one of them, the only other child of the group, has reached out to Georgie in a letter promising details of what really occurred. Under extreme protest and with the suspicion that their mom may be losing her mind, Georgie's grown children and two grandchildren reluctantly join her on a journey up a wild Wisconsin river and into the heart of the mysteries that shroud her past. With a keen sense of place and pacing, Shreve (You Are the Love of My Life, 2012) weaves a subtle but unrelenting pattern of malevolence in this portrait of a woman burdened by the sins of her father and sustained by her unshakable belief in his innocence.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"GOD, I WAS AWFUL at choosing friends." You said it, Anna. Or Sophie. Or whatever your name is. The fiery heroine of Denise Mina's endlessly surprising new mystery, CONVICTION (Mulholland, $27), has left her home and family in Glasgow and is on the run, trying to outrace the secrets that keep bubbling up from her past. Some things we know for sure: Anna McDonald, as she's calling herself these days, has adopted the identity of an ordinary housewife living a routine existence in a nondescript suburb. But when her husband discards her for her best friend, she tells the children goodbye and bolts, ignoring her own troubles to clear the name of an old friend. Leon Parker is dead, but when she met him, he was a guest at a castle in the Highlands where she was passing herself off as a chambermaid. Leon has been vilified for supposedly killing himself and his children on the Dana, a yacht that sank with their bodies inside. At least, that's the story told on a true-crime podcast series called "Death and the Dana" that makes Anna positively livid. The damage done on social networks in the name of truth and transparency is a major theme in this incredible novel, which seems to have been written in a whitehot rage. Mina also takes on big issues like gang rapes by sports teams ("They said I did it myself, for attention and sympathy," says one battered victim), the toll that hard drugs take on nice people like Adam Ross ("the sickest alive person I'd ever seen") and the received wisdom of certain males about certain women ("The eternal companions of all clever women are mistrust and scorn"). And at the center of it all is Anna, not quite a free spirit - not in a world that doesn't respect freedom or honor spirit - but more like an indomitable life force committed to saving the damned, even when she's unable to do more than fix a few things as best she can. Mina has always written with a head full of ideas and a mouth full of tough talk. Here, she's finally got a story big enough to hold it all together. at age 70, the protagonist of Susan Richards Shreve's sweetly melancholy new novel, more news TOMORROW (Norton, $25.95), Still feels like an orphan. Georgianna Grove was 4 years old when her father went to prison for strangling her mother, and although she never believed in his guilt, she also never felt compelled to seek out the true killer - until now. Gathering up her family, she steers them on a canoe trip up the Bone River to Missing Lake, Wis., where the 1941 murder was done. No one can deny Georgie, who collects lost souls at a boardinghouse she calls the Home for the Incurables. But as someone smartly observes, "You have to admit this is a very strange trip." Actually, the expedition is more like some mythic journey of selfdiscovery, held aloft by Shreve's silken prose. Sharing the narrative are two principal storytellers: Georgie herself, who is finally ready to face the family heritage, and her 13-year-old grandson, Thomas, who is beginning to understand the value his grandmother places on each trip she takes, "believing that I will find something but knowing that I may not." THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS that Scandinavian writers do very, very well, like describing harsh weather and desolate places. In THE ISLAND (Minotaur, $27.99), Ragnar Jonasson presents Iceland's gloomy West Fjords peninsula as a "treeless landscape stretching out bleak and ominously empty in the gathering dusk," in Victoria Cribb's translation. Nevertheless, love-smitten Benedikt accompanies his new girlfriend there in the autumn of 1987 to swim in a natural hot springs pool and to canoodle in the hut her family owns. The swim goes well, the canoodling not so much, because after his girl tells Benedikt about the ghost that haunts the valley, this idyll takes a bad turn. Ten years on, Benedikt is still staggering under "the strain of keeping up the deception, of carrying the weight of this unbearable secret." Then Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir, the detective in this flinty series, begins looking into the old case because it seems relevant to a current investigation. Consider this one of the author's best plots, layered with that dour Scandinavian atmosphere we love. who conned me into reading Deborah Goodrich Royce's finding mrs. ford (Post hím, $27), anyway? Oh, right - I chose this first novel myself. Something about the flashbacks - from staid, starchy Watch Hill, R.I., in 2014 to big, bad Detroit in 1979 - made it feel sexy and a little dangerous. That's the feeling that thrills goody-good-girl Susan Bentley when she meets wild-child Annie Nelson and "dazzling" Sammy Fakhouri on her summer job as a cocktail waitress at a mobrun disco. The position turns out to be more exciting than Susan bargained for, and at the end of the summer, someone is dead and someone else wishes she'd decided to work at a less exciting place, like the Dairy Queen. And now, all these years later, posh Susan finds the F.B.I. on her doorstep. The prosaic level of the writing doesn't improve, but the story is a fun one, with a nifty twist midway. It's also a resounding object lesson on why cocktail waitressing at a mob joint does not necessarily make a great summer job. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
