Little Monsters

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Emily, the mother “Ken lost, and Abby never had,” died immediately after Abby’s birth, and looms like a shadow throughout the novel. When I first received an unsolicited copy of Little Monsters to review, my immediate assumption is that it would turn out to be an elevated beach read. As often happened at dusk, a fracas erupted offshore—bluefish, crazed with hunger, thrashed, and arced open-mouthed, having corralled a school of bunkers to the surface.

With the Cape Cod setting in the background and the last months of national innocence before a sociopathic reality star claims the presidency, this is a snapshot of a place and a time and most of all, of a family that we come to know very well. Ken was nursing old grievances, their father’s fuse was growing ever shorter, and Abby felt herself pulling away from them both. In the pitch-black depths of the Pacific Ocean north of the Galápagos Islands, they’d encountered evidence—in the form of foot-long clams, giant red tube worms, and spiny white crabs—that even in darkness, there was life.

It has the writing and sensuality of a literary novel but it's paced like a commercial novel-- in other words, this is the perfect beach read for the smart set. I felt very sorry for him when the ogre told him he would never, EVER be a monster but this was the only sad part and it turned out very happy in the end.

The fully realized setting of Wellfleet Woods, halfway between the tip and the elbow of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, launches Adrienne Brodeur’s mesmerizing, modern day saga about a dysfunctional family so cleverly drawn as to make the story’s dynamic relatable and completely understandable. The chapters in Little Monsters alternate between the three Gardners and two other characters, who add depth of field to hidden events in the Gardner’s complicated history. Was it too much to ask that the person evaluating his mental state have at least one gray hair on his head? I’ve always been obsessed with sibling dynamics and fiction on family dramas, this one really delivers.We meet Adam Gardner, a brilliant oceanographer with an almost obsessive fascination with whales, counting down the summer months to his 70th birthday in September.