Lamb

June 20, 2011
Lolita gets a 21st-century spin in this gripping debut. Unlike Humbert Humbert, David Lamb is not obsessed with underage girls but stumbles across one. David's wife has left him, his father has died, and his work life is in shambles when outside a strip mall he meets a seventh-grade girl, "a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes" named Tommie, whom he entices into a pretend kidnap game "to scare" her friends. What he does once he gets her in his car is drive her home, but he also continues to meet her and give her rides to school. Their friendship intensifies, leading to a road trip, "Just a little secret trip in your secret life," from Chicago to an abandoned family house of David's in rural Colorado. There they hole up and eat beans, eggs, and junk food while Tommie's mother has no idea where she is. What David promises the 11-year-old is a fantasy, and he comes across as a father figure, a friend, but at times something far more creepy. With Colorado neighbors snooping, the questions become, how far will this go and what will happen if anyone finds out? Nadzam has a crisp, fluid writing style, and her dialogue is reminiscent of Sam Shepard's. The book suffers from the inevitable Nabokov comparison, but it's a fine first effort: storytelling as accomplished as it is unsettling.

May 1, 2011

A journey novel that gets increasingly creepier the further west we go.

The title refers to David Lamb, who's recently lost his father, and who has had an inadvertent encounter with 11-year-old Tommie, a girl dared by her two friends to bum a cigarette off of David outside a convenience store. Fifty years old, lonely and now detached (in all ways) from his job, David turns the tables on Tommie's friends by colluding with her in pretending to abduct her for a brief period of time. After he lets her go—and after Tommie finds out that her friends don't care one way or the other whether she's been kidnapped—David and Tommie decide to get away for a while. They head west from the dreary Chicago suburb where they live—on the lam (Lamb?) as it were—and try to find a more open, congenial and attractive space in which to let their lives unfold. David emerges as a disturbing character whose intentions are never quite clear. His interest in Tommie is borne out of his loneliness, and while their relationship flirts with the sexual, it never explicitly crosses over—though Nadzam skillfully holds out the possibility that it might. David's self-professed motivation is to expose Tommie to a wider, more uncommon world than she would ever encounter around Chicago, and he succeeds in doing this. Complicating the relationship between David and Tommie is the rather unrealistic intrusion of David's girlfriend Linnie, an alluring woman whose attraction to him is bewildering. Toward the end of the novel, David confesses to Tommie that his exposure to some less-than-nice people has made him "behave a little erratically sometimes..."—and it's clear this is an understatement.

A disturbing and elusive novel about manipulation and desperate friendship.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011

At once fantastic and all too believable, this unusual debut novel moves at the unsettling pace of a psychological thriller. The narrative tracks the long trip taken by middle-aged David Lamb and Tommie, the 11-year-old girl he meets and coerces to accompany him from Chicago to the Rockies in the weeks following the disintegration of his marriage and the death of his father. Nadzam sets out to show us that Lamb doesn't consciously make bad decisions. Gifted at delusion and desperate to regain faith in himself, Lamb is convinced that his attentions are in Tommie's best interests--if not for him and his bounty, the pathetic, unattractive little girl would never experience beauty. And if not for her, he thinks, his world would reflect only darkness and deception. VERDICT A compelling variation on a disturbing but all-too-familiar theme that will find an audience among serious readers.--Joyce J. Townsend, Pittsburg, CA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2011
David Lamb's life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his father has just died, and he's in danger of losing his job. Outside a Chicago strip mall, he meets Tommie, a lonely 11-year-old who lives with her distant mother and her mother's creepy boyfriend. David and Tommie embark on an unusual friendship when David pretends to kidnap her to scare her friends and ends up with a real kidnapping of sorts, a road trip to David's family cabin in rural Colorado. David lures Tommie with the promise of a new life filled with freedom and adventure. They stay in rustic motels and eat junk food, and he showers her with gifts. As their journey unfolds, David's multiple roles as captor, father figure, and friend blur in ways that are both liberating and disturbing. Nadzam's descriptions of the outdoors beautifully convey the wonder of the natural world and provide a soothing balance to characters wrestling with their own questionable behavior.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)