Arlene McKanic

The reliably prolific Jodi Picoult returns with Lone Wolf, an absorbing story about an unusual, fractured family. When Luke Warren and his daughter Cara get into a ghastly car wreck, Luke suffers such brain damage that no one knows if he’ll ever recover. The family, including Cara’s remarried mother, stepfather and estranged brother, gather to try and determine if the plug should be pulled or not.

The page-turning potential of such a story might be enough for other writers, but Picoult’s focus on her characters makes the story that much more compelling. The story’s second most compelling character is Cara, who, to be blunt, is a thoroughly dislikable brat. Still, as full of self-absorbed teenage angst as she is, the reader sympathizes with her. A child not only of divorce but of familial implosion, she’s the one who insists there’s still hope for her beloved father. Her older brother Edward, on the other hand, would like Luke to end his life with some kind of dignity. Edward parted abruptly, angrily, from their father, and Cara is sure he wants Luke dead out of spite. Edward and Cara’s mother Georgie is, like mothers are, torn between her warring older children as well as her obligations to her new, young family. She also feels some residual obligation to Luke, the man who, she can’t forget, swept her off her feet once upon a time.

If Cara is the second most compelling character, Luke is the first. A mountain of a man, he’s gained notoriety for his study and care of wolves; he even spent a couple years living with a pack. The chapters are narrated by different characters, and Luke’s insights into wolf society make his contributions the most intriguing. By the end, you understand Luke’s tragedy: He knew everything about living with wolves, and very little about living with humans.

Picoult keeps the reader’s emotions seesawing till the last page. Lone Wolf has much to say about families—both human and animal—and the love, resentment and desperation that come into play during one human family’s time of trouble.

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Jodi Picoult goes Behind the Book of Lone Wolf.

It’s amazing how one mistake, one mistimed incident, can affect a family for decades. Mabel and Alberta (Bertie) Fischer, the protagonists of Nancy Jensen’s heartbreaking debut novel, The Sisters, are teenagers from Juniper, Kentucky. Their father died in World War I, when they were too young to really know him, and their mother marries a man so villainous that he borders on caricature. When the mother dies, the girls are left defenseless. Mabel has a plan, but that plan goes very wrong and results in generations of wounded women.

Jensen, whose novel was inspired by a rift in her own family that no one ever knew the cause of, helpfully provides a genealogical chart at the beginning of her book, and it’s sometimes needed. Yet she’s such an accomplished writer that she gives each character her own drama, and her own pain. There’s Mabel and Bertie, the recipients of the original wound. Mabel triumphs over disaster to become a renowned photographer, while Bertie marries a man she respects but never quite comes to love, though their marriage is successful and lasts for decades. As the mother of Alma and Rainey, Bertie is often withholding; the reader feels her view of life is to muddle through and endure it. Mabel rescues a little girl from the same sort of monstrous home life she suffered, then raises her, with great love, as her own daughter.

The story of the Fischer sisters is a woman’s story. The men are tangential, save Hans, Bertie’s steadfast husband. Bertie and Hans remind the reader—who may be more used to tales of breathless passion—that a couple can quietly abide together out of goodwill and the tasks of raising a family and running a home. The other Fischer women tend not to be as fortunate.

While Jensen’s men aren’t as richly drawn as her female characters, they too are pulled, without their knowledge, into the Fischer women’s trauma. Would these women have married the men they married, or not married the men they didn’t marry, had the thing that happened when Mabel and Bertie were girls been avoided? It’s no surprise that Rainey’s eccentric daughter Grace makes chain-link armor. Jensen’s book deftly explores both the armor and the links that went into creating and sustaining the wounded Fischers.

This sad book is about a man whose marriage disintegrates because he can’t say, “I love you.” And it’s a book about a woman whose marriage disintegrates because she can no longer tolerate not hearing her husband say, “I love you,” year after frustrating year. So it is that Michael and Kelly Hays, after many years of marriage and a daughter, Samantha, decide to throw in the towel and divorce; the only problem is that Kelly doesn’t show up in court to sign the papers. Instead, she gets in her car and drives straight from her house in Pensacola to New Orleans, and checks into the small hotel that the couple considered “theirs” whenever they were in the city. But once in familiar room 303, Kelly finds herself anchorless, defenseless and sliding into despair.

Michael is a successful defense lawyer, and his lucrative job has allowed Kelly to dabble in charity work and other things. Anticipating the formal end of his marriage, he’s taken up with a sweet young flibbertigibbet who literally swans around in crinolines for much of the book. Yet Michael’s instinct and his long years with Kelly not only tell him that she’s at “their” hotel, but that something has gone and is going very wrong.

Robert Olen Butler, a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is masterful in the way he draws us into the hearts of his characters. It’s tempting to say that Kelly and Michael have Daddy issues, but that would be too glib. Kelly’s father was mentally ill; Michael’s father believed the withholding of tenderness was the proper way to be a man and passed that belief on to his son, to devastating effect. For the Hays’ tragedy is that in his heart, Michael is neither cold nor unloving, no matter how hard he tries to be.

Butler gives the last pages of his quiet book the urgency of a thriller. The ending might be too on the nose for some readers, but for this reviewer, it was heartbreaking, and just right.