The Year That Follows

April 13, 2009
A daughter and her father navigate “the year that follows” September 11, revealing secrets and healing old wounds in this slightly higher-brow Nicholas Sparksian melodrama. Single mother Cat searches for the orphaned child of her brother, Kyle, after Kyle died on 9/11 in one of the towers. Turns out Kyle had confessed to Cat the night before that he believes he is a father, and that the child's mother worked in the World Trade Center. A year after the attack and with no orphan located, Cat's father, Sam, a widowed former military man dying of heart disease, invites Cat to join him in marking the anniversary of Kyle's death. Both Cat and Sam embark on emotional journeys toward each other and reconciliation, and along the way they each find love. The numerous sappy passages don't do any favors for a book with an already maudlin premise.

Starred review from April 15, 2009
A taut, masterfully controlled and profoundly moving novel about family ties—blood or otherwise.

The prologue to the third novel by Lasser (All I Could Get, 2002, etc.) begins ominously, in New York, on the morning of the day that the chapter title identifies simply as"9/11.""What a glorious day," thinks 41-year-old Kyle, a bond trader who has done so well for himself that he plans to retire in four years. He has just paid for his sister, Cat, two years older, to come visit him from Detroit, and the two commemorate the death of their mother so many years ago. Kyle reveals that a woman with whom he had recently ended a passionate affair has a baby son, apparently his. So life goes on, until it so abruptly doesn't, for Kyle and for his former lover, who also dies that day, leaving Cat to come to terms with the fact that her beloved brother may well have left a son behind. Cat also has a son, from a marriage that was a mistake, and a father from whom she isn't quite estranged but with whom she isn't particularly close. As the novel unfolds at a matter-of-fact pace, wallowing neither in melodrama nor sentimentality, chapters alternate between those in which Cat's life unfolds and those featuring her father, who wants to reunite with her, a year after his son's death, for a ceremony of the Jewish faith in which neither of them believes,"paying reverence to an unknown God, often in a language they could not understand." By then both father and daughter have secrets they're reluctant to share. In the wake of shattering loss, they must pick up the pieces while negotiating the delicate balance between holding on and moving on. In the process, they rediscover the essence of family, how it helps them to"handle life, the way it unfolded, uncertain and unknowable."

A novel with barely a wasted word or an emotion that doesn't ring true.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2009
In his latest, Lasser ("All I Could Get") deals with the harrowing aftereffects of 9/11, but this is not the whole story. He skillfully incorporates those awful events into a human story that deals with tragedy but offers hope, making everyone's broken life seem fixable while reminding us that death and loss happen all the time. A single woman, Cat, and her father, Sam, struggle with their relationship after the death of Cat's brother Kyle on 9/11 and with a mystery he left behind: Cat must track down an orphaned infant son she didn't know Kyle had. As the story deepens with flashbacks, remembrances, and surprises, it gains an irrefutable momentum that builds to the last page. In the end, the book clarifies the importance of family and shows us that what really matters after a tragedy is "the year that follows"how we deal with the consequences. There are few books this reviewer is compelled to finish in one sitting, and this was one of them.Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2009
Add Lassers gripping yet subtle family drama to the list of 9/11 novels, and rank it high for emotional power and zero exploitation. The story begins in Manhattan on September 10. Cat, a divorced mother of a sweet eight-year-old boy, arrives for a rare visit with her single brother Kyle. Having just learned that a former lover has a son, Kyle believes hes a father, but before he can find out for sure, both he and Siobhan perish in the vaporized towers. Deeply shaken, Cat returns to her lonely life in Michigan, determined to find the now orphaned boy, while her kind and quietly wise widower father, Sam, a World War II veteran, mourns Kyle in his California home. Getting to know Lassers complex and affecting characters is a profound pleasure, as is his radiant understanding of intimate relationships between parents and children and men and women. The strong, sure current of his magnetizing prose delivers one stunning revelation after another in this sinuous tale of biology-leaping familial connections. Every rinsed-clear sentence carries the unbearable tension of fear-laced hope as Cat struggles toward forgiveness and love, and Sam accepts the painful but affirming collision of loss and joy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)