Review by Booklist Review
Freudenberger follows Lost and Wanted (2019) with another intriguing tale of a woman scientist, family, and life's confoundments. French marine biologist Nathalie is studying the impact of climate change on corals near a French Polynesian atoll. Her American cardiologist ex-husband is navigating the maelstrom of COVID-19 in New York City. Their teenage daughter, Pia, is pulled between them, a tug-of-heart complicated by two disparate places, cultures, and crises. Stephen's second wife, Kate, a high-school teacher with a painful past, is pregnant and teaching remotely. One of her students, Athyna, is struggling with alarming problems at home, posing a rending contrast to privileged, if miserable, Pia. Darkly obsessed with the ongoing damage wrought by nuclear testing in the Pacific, Pia left "paradise" for New York, but stays in touch with Raffi, a Tahitian who works for Nathalie's lab and who may be considering ecosabotage to protest the looming threat of catastrophically disruptive undersea mining. Freudenberger is fluent in every realm, social conundrum, and crime against the earth she brings into focus, keenly attuned to science and emotion, tradition and high-tech, race and gender, greed and conscience, irony and tragedy. Each character's challenges are significant on scales intimate and global and their wrestling with secrets, anger, and fear grows increasingly suspenseful in this lambent, deeply sympathetic, and thought-provoking novel.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Freudenberger (Lost and Wanted) offers a layered story of race and privilege set against the backdrop of Covid-19 lockdowns. Pia, 15, has been raised since her parents' divorce five years ago on the island of Mo'orea in French Polynesia by her marine biologist mother, Nathalie. Now, in fall 2020, Pia's sent to live with her father, Stephen, a cardiologist in New York City, where, with Covid case numbers decreasing and the lockdown lifting, Nathalie hopes she will get some much needed "socialization of her peers." Stephen lives with his younger, pregnant wife, high school teacher Kate, whose relationship with Pia starts off strained. Meanwhile, one of Kate's students, Athyna, who is Black, takes care of her toddler nephew full-time while trying to complete her senior year remotely in Staten Island. The eventual friendship between Pia and Athyna provides an opportunity for Freudenberger to explore the girls' varying experience of the pandemic due to racial and class differences, as when Athyna joins the family in the Hamptons and Pia urges her to say she's Pia's friend to anyone who asks where she lives. Freudenberger's longtime fans will find all the probing social insights and well-drawn characters they've come to expect from this accomplished author. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Tahiti and New York, a white family splintered by divorce and geography confronts problems during the pandemic. Freudenberger's fourth novel opens underwater in Polynesia on the last day of 2020, where French marine biologist Nathalie is scuba diving when she is called to shore to take a phone call. It's her ex-husband's second wife phoning from New York to say they have lost track of 15-year-old Pia, who hasn't been seen for several days. This particular plotline, which unfolds over the course of a day, is one among several in this complex novel with five point-of-view characters: Nathalie; her ex, Stephen, a physician in the intensive care unit of a New York hospital; their daughter, Pia; Stephen's pregnant second wife, Kate, a high school teacher; and Athyna, one of Kate's students, a Black girl who cares for her toddler nephew. The apparent threat and suspense generated by the missing-teenager story attenuates fairly quickly, and this slackening is echoed in so many other threads that it almost seems a motif. There's a secret email correspondence, a snarky hidden notebook, an age-inappropriate infatuation, a car accident on a Long Island expressway, a character who walks into a chainsaw blade; there's the politics of colonialism, nuclear testing, and coral mining; and of course, there's the Covid-era ICU and the pregnancy. It would be a lot to worry about, but after a while, you realize you don't need to worry. "I have the balls," says one character, explaining why one of the bad things has been called off, "not the stomach." As in Freudenberger's previous work, scientific points are well integrated and explained, and the intelligent, precise narration is a pleasure, with graceful depiction of the characters' inner lives. Too much and not enough. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
