Summer cannibals

Melanie Hobson

Book - 2018

Summoned to their magnificent family home on the shores of Lake Ontario--a paradisiacal mansion perched on an escarpment above the city--three adult sisters Georgina, Jax, and Pippa, come together in what seems like an act of family solidarity. Pregnant and unwell, the youngest, Pippa, has left her husband and four young children in New Zealand and returned home to heal. But home to this family means secrets, desire, and vengeance--and feasting on the sexual appetites and weaknesses of others. Each daughter has her own particular taste, and overlaying everything is their parents, with unquenchable desires and cravings of their own. As the affluent family endures six intense days in one another's company, old fissures reappear. When lon...g-buried truths finally come to light, the sisters and their parents must face the unthinkable consequences of their actions.

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Subjects
Genres
Novels
Published
New York : Black Cat 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Melanie Hobson (author)
Edition
First Grove Atlantic edition
Physical Description
277 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780802128522
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Several years after Georgina and Jax moved out to begin their own careers and families, they are called back to their family mansion on the edge of Lake Ontario for the sake of their youngest sister, Pippa, who is pregnant and unwell. Pippa leaves her husband and four children in New Zealand and joins her family in Canada to heal on the cusp of her father's first summer garden tour. Over six intense days in each other's company, the sisters' long-locked-up secrets threaten to undermine them as they seek vengeance, fulfillment of their desires, and the exploitation of the weaknesses of others. When the deeply buried truths are finally revealed, each family member must face the consequences of his or her actions. Hobson's debut novel is packed with complex relationships and a torrent of emotions as she lifts the highly composed veil from a seemingly put-together, affluent family and brilliantly exposes the lust and betrayal behind their palatial walls. The intricacies of Hobson's characters and her exceptional new voice will keep readers riveted.--Emily Park Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Hobson's scattershot debut, three grown sisters-Georgina, Jax, and Pippa-converge on their troubled parents' waterfront mansion along the banks of Lake Ontario. Ostensibly summoned there for a garden tour, each of the sisters arrives burdened with emotional baggage: Pippa, eight months pregnant, has curiously left her husband and four children back in New Zealand; Georgina, an academic, is alienated from her own husband, also an academic; Jax, also married, has unresolved romantic issues with a high school love interest. Add to this confluence of marital drama the bizarre, licentious relationship between the women's parents, David and Margaret, and the plot starts to seem like a few bad marriages too many. The tour leaves David's beloved garden trampled, then a mysterious young woman, dubbed "Goldilocks" by Margaret, shows up sleeping in a guest room bed. From there, the novel tips into melodramatic territory, as readers discover of a slew of secrets and revelations, including Pippa's husband's interest in polyamory. Though occasionally evocative, the writing isn't precise or particular enough to sustain interest in the novel's various scandalous threads. The stately house at the center of the novel exerts a profound hold on its characters, one that never fully grabs the reader. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT We've seen this type of dysfunctional family before, but first novelist -Hobson refreshes the trope in a family psychodrama that upends the old stereotype that all Canadians are bland and inoffensive. David is an egocentric monster, while Margaret is both his victim and enabler, yet their adult children still crave their approval. The parents live in a palatial mansion near Hamilton, Ont., overlooking the lake. Money and status are all that matters; this family's emotional life is as cold as Toronto in January. Daughters George (Georgina), Jax, and Pippa have returned for a summer visit, bringing their troubles with them. George is the oldest and most responsible, Jax is like her father, and youngest daughter Pippa, who is eight months pregnant, has left her husband and four children back in New Zealand. Over the course of a disastrous weekend in August, family secrets come to light and tensions reach a boiling point, as a darkly comic garden tour from hell brings disturbing strangers into the mix. David's elaborate garden is practically a character of its own. VERDICT Hobson draws a riveting picture of twisted family dynamics in this compulsively readable novel.-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The six days during which the variously dissatisfied Blackfords reunite around a family crisis are marked by bad behavior, old secrets, and recalibrated life choices.David and Margaret Blackford may make an attractive couple, but he considers marriage "a sour deal" and she wants him to fail, "any chance to take him down a notch or two." Their three adult daughters, Georgina, Jacqueline, and Philippagiven quasi-boys' names because David always wanted a sonalso express disenchantment and grievances about their lives and marriages: Georgina yearns to go back and take a different path; Jax, like her father, blames her spouse for her own failings; and Pippa wishes there were more to life than drift. Hobson's debut is founded in this family's repetitive chorus of complaints, which the author casually pulls apart, injects with absurdity and some horror, and then reassembles. The family home is a vast mansion sited on five acres of parkland overlooking Lake Ontario, a luxurious dwelling but also a place of violent intimacy. The lavish garden is David's pride and joy and is about to be opened to the public, against Margaret's wishes since Pippaheavily pregnant with her fifth childis suddenly on her way home from New Zealand, and the other girls are returning, too, to lend support. Hobson's narrative is calm even when her consideration of individual characters is interrupted by flashes of wild revelation or event, from the farcical garden tour to the perilous fall of a newborn off a cliff. In the novel's surreal, sexually avid, sometimes fairy-tale world, such extremes might shock, or else might appear to be false starts, keeping the reader off balance within a teetering landscape.A tale of scorching family dysfunction that ranges among the gothic, domestic, and carnal, snagging the reader's attention with its odd, unpredictable vision. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1   The house had its way of holding them. Their father liked to tell how he'd bought it with a credit card--a cash advance to make up the ten percent needed for the deposit--and it seemed as equally and gloriously ridiculous, that this should all be theirs. That first day, after the papers were signed, the sisters had run laughing and shrieking through the house with its three floors, two staircases, seven bedrooms and all the rest-- living, dining, family, library, kitchen, butler's pantry, bath- rooms, hallways, passageways and entryways. They explored and claimed rooms and then just as quickly relinquished them as they found another and another, shouting that they were lost, crying out that they'd found "the best thing ever," bare feet thud- ding up and down, up and down, across and over. Doors slammed. Drawers were pulled open and locks fiddled with. The old laundry chute was discovered and heads were put through the small doors on each landing that let into it as they prodded each other, but none of them were brave enough to go to the chute's terminus in the basement. That rough stonewalled basement the original builders had dynamited from the solid limestone of the escarpment the house was perched on. Beyond the house's walls, at the base of that cliff, was the city--gridded to the enormous lake like a mesh to keep the jutting land, and all it supported, from tumbling down.      I can't hear the children, their father had said, looking at his wife triumphantly. This house swallows them.      They were leaning on the metal fence at the cliff's edge, the whole world spread out in front of them, and anyone would think these parents too young to have all this. That something was wrong; a mistake. But they knew that this was nothing less than what they deserved: the five acres of parkland which they would turn into exquisite gardens to surround the grand house with a landscape to match it in size and manner--this had always been owed to them. They were a couple whom people referred to as 'handsome' and it suited them because they resonated good breeding and all that went with it: high birth, property, education, bloodlines you could trace back to royalty. They were handsome and they knew it to be true, and theirs was a world that rewarded such things. David and Margaret Blackford were exactly where they were meant to be--at the dead end of a private lane you could drive by without noticing because the newer, smaller houses of the neighbourhood acted like a palisade of brick and mortar to keep the riff-raff out. The lane's three big houses were dealt in along the cliff's edge, a vestige from a time when it had all been fields and the founding families of that region had built their houses on the escarpment's very brow. This view had always been worth braving the winter gales that howled up off the lake and even then, in the early century, the occupants knew the defensible value of a horizon.      At the lane's entrance, where it met the ordinary street, was a bulging masonry wall behind which was a cloistered convent: a rundown mysterious place their father forbade them from entering. Even the name of the convent terrified: Sisters of the Precious Blood. Their father, who rarely noticed what his girls whispered about and even more rarely took an interest in it, had--with that single restriction--made the place irresistible. In the years to come, one of the nuns would take daily walks up and down the lane from the convent to the family's driveway and back again, having taken a vow of silence and contemplation. And the girls would tempt her, with their father's encouragement, because he saw the nun's appearance at his property line for what it was: a trespass. They would lounge near the gate on their bicycles and then speed out to intercept, shouting hellos, riding circles, going no-hands, skidding their tires, trying to get her to respond. Doing everything short of touching her as she walked in an eddy of robes like a villain from a comic book, her presence making the vampire crypts and legions of undead seem more likely than ever. And when the sun would go down the girls would scramble to shut their bedroom windows, even on the hottest nights, afraid she'd come for them. As if she were the greatest threat to their security, their little paradise. The only person they had to fear.      Their driveway, where the nun turned, was defined by two stone pillars which were knocked over regularly by the garbage truck and snowplow. The drivers piled the wreckage back up at new and eccentric angles in a sneering indictment of this fancy house with its crude gateposts that deserved to be bulldozed because maybe then the rich bastards would put up something appropriate, like electric gates with a keypad to come and go. A code they'd have to be trusted with. It was only the cases of beer at Christmastime--put out on the porch steps to freeze overnight--that stopped them from leaving the blocks where they fell. Instead of a metal gate, the girls' father used an old sawhorse to block the property's entrance from the regular snoopers who liked to just barely roll their cars along the lane and down the long drive as though this were their right--to take in the acres of gardens and the orchestrated countryside at a crawl, stopping to exclaim over new blooms or a shrub's lush foliage when their selfsame shrub back at their modest home was still bare. As if that was treason. Just another betrayal to add to their list of grievances against these upstarts who took and kept everything for themselves. The gawkers would stop at the house and look around contemptuously before turning to inch back out, trawling for every shred of evidence to justify their position that here, without question, was the rot underpinning the nation's decay.      The girls' father believed that the simple wooden sawhorse he placed at the gate, with his own hands, was a denial of that judgment that wealth begat indolence because there was something practical and self-reliant about that barrier. And it fit perfectly, he would say, with the Georgian style of the house which echoed gentle country living and turnstiles, fox hunts and steeplechases, noblesse oblige, even though (their mother would remark) this was Hamilton, Canada--a town founded in the monstrous flick- ering shadows of the steel mills on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. A place where at night, deep in the east end, you could see the climbing flames firing the stack that spewed soot onto the narrow red brick houses in the adjacent streets, coating them, Blakean. This was Hamilton, a workers' town.      They were sisters: Georgina, Jacqueline and Philippa. Adults now, and with families of their own, but the youngest, Pippa, was sick. Eight months pregnant with her fifth, she'd left her hus-band and four children in New Zealand and was coming here. The others were coming home too. More than three decades had passed since they'd run through the house on that first day, and there'd been days--too many to count--when the house had sat hard and unloved within its ruffle of green grass and hedge and flower. When the sky was dull and grey and the windows reflected bleakness, all flat and giving nothing back, and it seemed a place of such uncompromising severity that its stone walls would let nothing in or out. And then some mornings, it would rise with the sun and display the warmth inherent in its blocks and the glass would gleam and the garden, that lush profusion, would reflect inward to the rooms and fill the house with life. Figures would move from window to window as though it were a dance and they partnered with the air. And it was on those days that the world was right and days were measured in increments of joy. It was all there was and would ever be. It was family. Excerpted from Summer Cannibals by Melanie Hobson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.