We are back with another blog tour and we could not thank Algonquin enough for our copies in exchange for our honest review!
This review and blog highlight is for Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle!
Synopsis:
Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both—suddenly, tragically—lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely.
Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries—perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Meanwhile, Frank has become obsessed with what might have been left behind at the house he lived in as a boy on the outskirts of town, where a young single mother, Shelley, is just trying to raise her son with some sense of normalcy. Frank’s repeated visits to Shelley’s house begin to trigger memories of her own family, memories that she’d rather forget. Because, after all, not all parents are ones you wish to remember.
Hieroglyphics reveals the difficulty of ever really knowing the intentions and dreams and secrets of the people who raised you. In her deeply layered and masterful novel, Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and what it means to be a child piecing together the world all around us, a child learning to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.
This book takes place across many decades as we follow Lil and Frank, a married couple that share a tragedy of both losing a parent who died too soon. It follows their journey from being young and having kids, living in Massachusetts, to decades later when they move down to North Carolina.
This story weaves together a tale of family, from the perspective of child and parent as they learn to navigate through relationships and heartbreak.
The writing in this book was quite beautiful and at times you could feel completely immersed into the heartbreak of losing a parent.
While the writing was something that brought this story to life, it also felt that the plot line got a bit repetitive. This sometimes made for a slow building story, as you felt like you were just revisiting the same things over and over.
As we have mentioned many times, we absolutely love books that are written with dual or multiple POVs to provide a deeper look into other character’s perspectives. So it will come as no shock that one of the things that we enjoyed about this book, is that it is told from 4 POVs. We get to follow both Lil and Frank on their journeys, as well as, a single mother Shelley and her son, Harvey who happen to live in the house that Frank grew up in.
All in all, this was a well written story that provides a look into family, relationships, heartbreak, and the legacy people would like to leave behind for their family and loved ones.
Book Details:
Title: Hieroglyphics
Author: Jill McCorkle
Publication Date: July 28, 2020 (TODAY!!)
Thanks again to the publisher for providing us copies for review. And as always, thank you so much for stopping by our blog, we really appreciate you all!
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