Plum and Jaggers

by Susan Richards Shreve

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW

Four young children are orphaned in 1974, when a terrorist bomb explodes on the Milan-Rome express train, in this touching novel about how families cope with violence and loss. The explosion occurs just after the elder McWilliamses leave their kids briefly to get lunch in the cafe car, which is the part of the train that's blown to bits. Dazed and frightened, Charlotte, Oliver and infant Julia cling to Sam, who, at age seven, is the oldest of the siblings. An Italian family cares for them until they're picked up by their kind but conservative grandfather, who--with their agoraphobic grandmother--raises them in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Though they love their new charges, the grandparents are distraught by the children's compulsive, secretive behavior, especially that of Sam, who, obsessed by his perceived responsibility to protect his family, becomes a loner with a bad reputation. After Sam is mistakenly blamed for the beating of a younger, handicapped boy, the family moves to Washington, D.C., where Sam shoplifts items to build a bomb shelter and is placed in a juvenile detention center. There, he conceives the idea for Plum & Jaggers, a comedy troupe eventually composed of his brother and sisters, whose bizarre scenarios transform with dark humor the tragedies of random violence and the ironies of modern life.

An accomplished author of adult (The Visiting Physician) and children's (The Formerly Great Alexander Family) fiction, Shreve reveals the orphans' creativity and self-destructiveness with balanced honesty, evoking her familiar themes of distrust and haunting memories. Best at sketches detailing individual quirks of the McWilliamses as they grow up, Shreve focuses more intensely throughout on the most disturbed, unstable and unusual character of Sam and leaves the other three siblings a bit sketchier. But through Sam's dark ebullience, Shreve traces the complexity of the family, including the spirits of the dead parents, offering a compassionate portrait of a courageous, troubled and resilient foursome.

A Student of Living Things, by Susan Richards Shreve

KIRKUS REVIEW

In the aftermath of a political murder, a young woman opts for vengeance in this thriller-paced family drama.

In the Washington, D.C., of a not-too-distant future, in the midst of mysterious bombings and red alerts and a Justice Department tightening the screws, law student Steven Frayn is shot on the steps of his university’s library. The FBI soon concludes that this was not just another random terrorist attack (cousin Bernard lost a leg to a bomb at a convenience store) but an assassination—someone wanted Steven dead. The murder unravels a close-knit family. Steven’s father retreats to the small hangar in the yard of their Bethesda home, where he is rebuilding an old plane—never mind that he doesn’t know how to fly. Mother Julia rants and makes suspect lists for the FBI. Uncle Milo decides what the family really needs is music, and so buys a piano. But it is the novel’s narrator, Steven’s sister Claire, who becomes embroiled in an unlikely plot to bring Steven’s killer to justice. A biology student (with a musty bedroom filled with dead and living things), Claire returns to school after the murder and (not so accidentally) meets Victor Duarte, a young radical who claims to have known Steven, and may have answers as to who killed him. The magnetic Victor convinces Claire that Benjamin Reed, a music student in Michigan and son of Charles Reed, head of the Justice Department, is Steven’s killer. Victor creates an elaborate plan to trap Benjamin, and Claire, in her shock and sorrow, can’t see the absurdity of the scheme. As Benjamin and Claire begin to exchange love letters of sorts—music that they compose—Claire begins to question what she knows about Victor, Steven and herself. Shreve’s storytelling, smart and economic, is in danger here of being too spare—her grand collection of characters is beautifully outlined, but not fully realized, and for a novel trading in emotional upheaval, that is no small flaw.

Evocative and thoughtful, but too thin to prove a success.

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For myself, I found Susan Richards Shreve's spare, economical writing effective in conveying the sense of loss that her primary character, Claire felt. Shreve's matter-of-fact presentation of an alternate post 9/11 reality was more foreboding than it would have been had she tried to dramatize the situation. All in all, a terrific read -- highly recommended