The Children

March 21, 2016
In Leary’s portrait of a quirky old-money family, secrets come to light as the family members redefine their relationships after the death of their patriarch. Since the recent death of her stepfather, Charlotte Maynard hasn’t strayed far from home. She spends her days holed up in the attic of their sprawling Connecticut lake house, writing the fake “mommy blog” that represents her primary source of income and trying to avoid her self-aggrandizing cheapskate of a mother. Charlotte’s initially delighted when her stepbrother, Spin, brings Laurel, his fiancée, home to meet the family: she’s a gorgeous, witty, almost improbably accomplished young woman who’s not only crazy about Spin, but charmed by the whole clan. The only person who doesn’t adore Laurel on sight is Charlotte’s sister, Sally, a brilliant but emotionally fragile musician. Soon, the house isn’t the only thing crumbling around Charlotte: as Sally confronts pieces of her past, her grip on reality loosens; Charlotte’s on-again, off-again relationship with the family’s groundskeeper hits yet another snag; and worst of all, someone’s threatening to have Charlotte’s fake blog investigated for fraud. Although Leary (The Good House) ties up her loose ends a little too neatly, her characters are a delightful blend of strong personalities, all with their own little touch of delicious evil, and her darkly comic send-ups of New England wealth, nouveau riche, and Internet culture should keep readers absorbed until the final, most shocking secrets are revealed.

March 15, 2016
Leary (The Good House, 2013, etc.) writes about nutty, pedigreed New Englanders in this noirish comedy in which financial wrangling and emotional secrets are kept under wraps within a well-born Connecticut family until the arrival of an interloper from west of the Rockies. Single, childless 29-year-old narrator Charlotte is a typical Leary character--likable but slightly bent. Charlotte makes a good living writing a fake mommy blog and swears she doesn't have agoraphobia although she hasn't left her home during the day since shortly after her beloved stepfather Whit's death three years ago. Charlotte's home is "Lakeside Cottage," where she and her older sister, Sally, grew up with Whit and their mother, Joan. Wealthy, eccentric Whit had two great passions: Joan and the banjo. He and Joan didn't believe in talking about, let alone spending, money. Although his two sons from his first marriage, Perry and Spin, have inherited the once-grand, now increasingly dilapidated family house, Whit requested that Joan be allowed to live there until her death. Enter Spin's new girlfriend, soon to be fiancee, Laurel, from Idaho. Laurel's resume--Olympic-level skier, MFA from USC, huge advance for her first novel, a relative of Ernest Hemingway--is as intimidating as her aggressively friendly manner. While Charlotte warms to Laurel's questionable charm, Sally, who has moved home after losing her job as a violinist in Manhattan, remains suspicious. But Sally, who has a history of sneakiness, sexual misbehavior, and mental illness, may not be the best judge of character. And Charlotte may not be, either; she's fascinated by Laurel's knowledge of what she calls "life hacks"--actually scams, like ways to use a fancy hotel's amenities without staying there--which are supposedly research for her novel. Leary is by turns affectionate and vicious toward her characters. So, is Laurel trustworthy? Was Whit? And what about Charlotte's off-and-on lover, Everett, who lives rent free on the property as a kind of caretaker and is not above flirting with an attractive woman like Laurel? In this deeply satisfying novel about how unknowable people can be, intrigue builds with glass shards of dark humor toward an ending that is far from comic.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2016
They were hardly the Brady Bunch, this blended family of Perry and Spin, Whit's two sons from his first marriage, and Sally and Charlotte, Joan's daughters from hers. The old-money rambling estate in the privileged Connecticut countryside was where Joan raised her girls upon her marriage to Whit, and where Perry and Spin spent obligatory weekends and vacations. Now that Whit has died, Joan stays on in the deteriorating house; Charlotte lives in the attic, writing a successful, if entirely bogus, blog; and concert-musician Sally comes and goes, depending on the status of her bipolar disorder. It's a fragile environment, one overtly threatened when Spin brings his too-good-to-be-true fiancee for a meet-and-greet. Suddenly, old wounds are gouged open, past rivalries reignited, and the legacy Whit and Joan worked hard to maintain may fall into the hands of a psychopathic opportunist. A read-in-one-sitting romp, Leary's (The Good House, 2013) wry and searing satire of affluence and elitism comically yet steadily builds to a sobering and malevolent finale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)