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Summary
Summary
The moving and suspenseful new novel that Ann Patchett calls "smart and thrilling and impossible to put down... the book that every reader longs for."
"This summer's undoubtable smash hit... an addictive, heart-palpitating story." -- Marie Claire
The sun is shining, the sea is blue, the children have disappeared.
When Liv and Nora decide to take their husbands and children on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The adults are lulled by the ship's comfort and ease. The four children--ages six to eleven--love the nonstop buffet and their newfound independence. But when they all go ashore for an adventure in Central America, a series of minor misfortunes and miscalculations leads the families farther from the safety of the ship. One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.
The disintegration of the world the families knew--told from the perspectives of both the adults and the children--is both riveting and revealing. The parents, accustomed to security and control, turn on each other and blame themselves, while the seemingly helpless children discover resources they never knew they possessed.
Do Not Become Alarmed is a story about the protective force of innocence and the limits of parental power, and an insightful look at privileged illusions of safety. Celebrated for her spare and moving fiction, Maile Meloy has written a gripping novel about how quickly what we count on can fall away, and the way a crisis shifts our perceptions of what matters most.
Author Notes
Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter , the short-story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the 10 Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review ), and a bestselling middle-grade trilogy. Her fiction has won the Paris Review 's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meloy was shortlisted for the UK's Orange Prize and chosen as one of Granta 's Best Young American Novelists.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A tropical vacation goes awry in Meloy's (Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It) ominous, addictive novel. When hardworking, ultraprivileged cousins Liv and Nora decide to whisk their families away on a whirlwind two-week luxury cruise down the coast of Mexico and Central America after Nora's mother dies, it seems like a win-win situation. Soothing sunshine; a friendly, attractive Argentinian couple with children around the same age as Nora's and Liv's; endless readymade shrimp cocktail. But when the groups separate for off-the-ship outings-the men for an impromptu golf excursion and the women and six kids for a zip line tour led by a local guide-and the children suddenly disappear, a stress-free trip away turns into an unexpected nightmare. The parents turn into helpless basket cases, while the kids-as they stumble onto a freshly dug grave, get kidnapped by a pair of drug-dealing brothers, hold on for dear life during a high-speed car chase, and get separated while on a freight train headed toward Nicaragua-grow ever more fearful when faced with life-threatening danger. In crafting this high-stakes page-turner, Meloy excels as a master of suspense. Though some of the circumstances seem piled on for the sake of melodrama and the adults' shoddy attempts to cope veer into soap opera territory, the story is nonetheless engrossing for all its nerve-racking twists and turns. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Meloy returns to adult fiction after her best-selling Apothecary series for kids, bringing her fluency in young characters to this propulsive drama about two movie-business-wealthy Los Angeles families on a Central American cruise. Producer Liv and her engineer husband, Benjamin, have an assertive 11-year-old daughter and a diabetic 8-year-old son. Liv's cousin Nora and Nora's husband, actor Raymond, the only African American adult in the group, have a smart 11-year-old son and an unflappable 6-year-old daughter. All is blissfully luxurious onboard, but when they go ashore, along with a couple from Argentina with two attractive teenagers, everything goes catastrophically wrong. As the six privileged children disappear in the pitiless jungle, Meloy splits the novel between their horrifying experiences and their frantic parents' harrowing struggles with the authorities. The Americans' nightmare involves a violent drug dealer and tragically impacts a young Ecuadoran girl's already perilous illegal journey to the States. Infusing literary fiction with criminality and terror in a mode similar to that of Ann Patchett and Hannah Tinti, Meloy compounds the suspense in this gripping and incisive tale by orchestrating a profoundly wrenching shift in perspective, and morality, as well-meaning tourists face the dark realities of a complex place they viewed merely as a playground. Meloy's commanding, heart-revving, and thought-provoking novel has enormous power and appeal.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
Guardian Review
This Central American thriller with plenty of pace and excitement is let down by a lack of heart Three well-heeled families are on holiday in Central America when all of their children go missing. It's an arresting premise for Maile Meloy 's new novel and, as everything I've read by her has been notable for its energy, wit and fearless emotional precision, I was intrigued to see what she would do with it. Liv and Nora, thirtysomething cousins from LA, book themselves, husbands and kids onto a two-week cruise down the coast of Mexico and Central America. Once on board, they hook up with another family, wealthy Argentinians with two long-limbed, sporty teenagers. When the husbands go golfing for the day, the mothers take all six kids, aged six to 15, on an excursion. "This is a good country for us to go ashore in," Liv says. "They call it the Switzerland of Latin America." And yes, alarm bells are already ringing. For the unnamed country turns out to be not very Swiss at all, but frighteningly chaotic and sinisterly foreign; you read on with mounting dread, as well as excitement, for it's impossible not to relish the skill with which Meloy ratchets up the tension. First, Pedro the well-meaning but lamentably chilled tour guide crashes the car, leaving his charges shaken and marooned without a bus in sight. Next, shepherding them to a pretty little beach at the mouth of a river, where he assures them it's safe for the children to cool off in the water, he passes round frozen rum and openly flirts with Nora. As the children shriek and splash, Liv and Camila the Argentinian mother doze off in the sun, while Nora heads off into the trees for "a little no-strings attention" from Pedro. A few moments later, all six children are gone. All credit to Meloy's glistening prose that every detail of this grisly scene is shudderingly convincing. The sultry afternoon, the beautiful, sheltered Americans knocked off course by a routine accident but left with no choice but to trust in the local, the faint moments of comedy, the momentary lapses of attention -- all of it rings uneasily true. Once the children are gone, everything accelerates and the plot unfurls swiftly and sleekly with chapters moving back and forth between adults and children with barely a viewpoint left unturned. As one queasy event follows another, it becomes clear that Meloy is not going to spare us -- the children are alive, but for how long? -- and there is no question of not reading on. I can't remember the last time I gobbled a novel down so fast. Sadly, it wasn't long before I realised I did not like the taste it was leaving. The problem can be identified in one word: tone. Given the sometimes graphically unpleasant nature of the events she describes, Meloy's writing begins to lack scope, sensitivity and even, sometimes, heart. It's almost as if, having decided to explore a subject with such viscerally dark and dramatic potential, she can't quite trust to the subtlety of her prose and allow less to be more: instead, she loses her nerve, retreating into quips and platitudes. Although we are told that the parents are distraught at having lost their children to this land of hungry crocodiles and ruthless criminals, we never quite feel it. Conversations seem oddly banal and lacking in any real urgency or despair. Yes, the grown-ups bicker and blame themselves and each other, but only in the way you might if your luggage or your iPad had gone missing. With her children already missing for several days, would Liv really bother to reflect on her "obscene" LA life and have sufficient emotional energy to debate whether her daughter's "desire to assert herself was fine at a progressive school with feminist teachers but was it working so well for her now?" Meloy's drive to stop and extract the ethical questions from the situation seems somehow at odds with her determination to confront its high-tension violence. And although I did believe that Nora might have allowed herself a heat- and alcohol-fuelled lapse with Pedro, it stretches credibility that she would continue any kind of dalliance during the long and terrible days that ensue. The moment when, outside his house in a cab, she translates "Nights in White Satin" into Spanish for the driver and observes to herself that "sappy moustache rock, it never died" plumbs a nadir of crassness. A novel that started out so promisingly develops a cartoon-like brittleness. The baddie is described lazily, almost Trumpishly, as "unredeemably bad" and the Tarantinoesque descriptions of eyeballs popping and blood spurting sit uneasily in a book which, in a real and disturbing way, includes the rape of a minor. It's Nora who later observes that losing a child "happens all the time, all over the world... and people go on. They can't just drop to the floor and scream for the rest of their lives." Maybe not, but my hunch is that a little more screaming would have made this novel feel warmer and sadder and ultimately a whole lot more affecting. Julie Myerson's The Stopped Heart is published by Vintage. - Julie Myerson.
Kirkus Review
Three families on a cruise are separated from their children during a shore excursion in Central America."On the walk to the buffet, Nora linked her arm through Liv's and put her head on her shoulder, making Liv feel excessively tall. 'I love you,' Nora said. 'This was a genius idea.' "But the fun part of this cruise is almost over for these cousins from Southern California. After cautiously staying aboard in Acapulco for fear of "beheadings and food-borne pathogens," at the next port the husbands are invited to golf by a new Argentinian friend, while Nora, Liv, and their brood of young children sign up for a zip-line tour of the rain forest. The Argentine's wife and her teenagers decide to join them. When the van breaks down on the way, the guide suggests an impromptu swim at a nearby beach, and soon after, all six kids disappear. The remainder of the book follows the children and the adults separately, also bringing in a seventh child, an impoverished South American 10-year-old making her way north to New York with her uncle. The plot unfolds with terrifying realism, made even more potent by Meloy's (The After-Room, 2015, etc.) sharp and economical character development. Every one of nearly 20 important characters is clearly distinguished by some memorable traitamong the kids, a Type 1 diabetic and his big boss-lady sister, a spectrum-y genius and a bunny-loving 6-year-old; among the adults, a mega-hot black Hollywood movie star and a neurotic, high-strung white studio execyet achieves three-dimensionality. Even the Latin American characters, who could easily become stereotypes (the tour guide, the drug lord, the maid, etc.), are more than that. This writer can apparently do it allNew Yorker stories, children's books, award-winning literary novels, and now, a tautly plotted and culturally savvy emotional thriller. Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Meloy (Madame Lazarus) makes her narrating debut with this disturbing thriller that showcases a parent's worst nightmare-the disappearance of children. Best friends and cousins Liv and Nora take their husbands and two children (each) on a holiday cruise. The families bask in the easy luxury, making friends with an Argentine couple with two kids as well. At a Central American stopover, the fathers decide to golf, the mothers and six children choose a zip line tour. When their tour van blows a tire en route, the motley group stops at a nearby beach. While the adults are distracted, the children vanish. Bonds, sanity, and truth are all tested as the parents begin their desperate search. As reader, Meloy delivers a narrative that is disproportionately languid, a jarring contrast to one that continuously describes brutal events-dead bodies, shallow graves, drug-running, and rape. More cringe-inducing are the stereotypes that populate the Latin American cast: drug lords, an eager-to-please guide, a maid, and undocumented immigrants. Her overprivileged, private school-attending, Tesla-driving, Hollywood-connected California tourists don't fare much better. VERDICT For stronger, less offensive narratives involving missing children try Janice Y.K. Lee's The Expatriates or Amity Gaige's Schroder. ["Speeds along through its first two-thirds, then falters": LJ 5/1/17 review of the Riverhead hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.