The Resolutions

February 10, 2020
In Hammes’s entertaining debut, three siblings return to their hometown of Chicago for a Christmas full of reckoning and misadventure. Samantha Brennan is a talented American dancer with a Moscow company whose work is compromised by her heroin addiction. Her brother Jonah is in Gabon doing his thesis on elephant communication until he runs afoul of some deadly ivory poachers, and her other brother Gavin is an actor in L.A. whose latest television series has just been canceled. Once home with their parents, Gavin and Jonah try to convince Sam to clean up her act, though Jonah has failed to sever his link to the poachers, who coerced him into smuggling ivory into the U.S. Eventually, all three siblings wind up in Gabon, where their bonds are mightily tested. Hammes brings his three fractious main characters to riotous life and turns their reunion into a life-changing journey that proves Jonah’s insightful assertion that a sibling is “like a part of yourself you can never really know.” This reads like a clever mash-up of Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, Romain Gary’s The Roots of Heaven, and Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, and delivers thrills while finding empathy for the cast’s troubled souls.

March 1, 2020
Three troubled siblings from Chicago go home for Christmas. It almost feels like some kind of novel-writing challenge--can you come up with a plot that brings together ballet in Russia, elephants in Africa, and unemployment in Hollywood? Hammes' debut proves he can do just that, sticking one of the three Brennan siblings in each of those situations. Samantha is with a ballet company in the boondocks north of Moscow; though we hear a lot about how talented she is, we mostly see her shooting heroin and stumbling around. Jonah is living all alone in the woods of West Africa, supposedly studying elephant communication on a research grant but really, at this point, just drinking all day. He is soon to get mixed up with someone named Slinky and be recruited into international smuggling. In Los Angeles, Gavin is an actor on a show called Makin' It. "It was like Friends meets Cheers, updated for the twenty-first century, but without the canned charm of the former and the easy, familiar humor of the latter." All three of these overachievers meet up in Chicago, where their parents have downsized into a condo atop a Walgreens. Mom and Dad are so lightly sketched they barely exist, and everyone behaves so strangely to one another that when the kids cut their trip short and rush off to Africa three days after Christmas on an emergency mission, you almost believe they could and would lie to their parents and say they're just heading off their separate ways. As flashbacks have by now established, these three have failed each other in the past. Can they change that now? When a child asks Gavin what it's like to have a sibling, he replies, "It's like a part of yourself you can never really know." Maybe so. What you can know something about, though, is the elephant-poaching industry, described here in gory and sickening detail. Too much and not enough.

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April 15, 2020
The three Brennan siblings are ambitious, moderately successful, and scattered around the globe. Samantha, the youngest, is a formerly promising ballerina who has been scorned by the New York scene for her unprofessionalism?largely brought on by her heroin addiction. She finds herself in rural Russia, the principal dancer in an obscure troop, trying to keep the production she's working on from becoming her swan song. Middle brother Jonah lives in a tent outside of a small town in Gabon, where he's researching the mourning rituals of elephants and drinking too much. Gavin, the oldest sibling, is a b-list television actor looking for love and his next big role. Hammes gives readers three sympathetic, compelling characters trying to find themselves as they grapple with adulthood and the reality of not having accomplished as much as they'd planned. Lovers of character-driven fiction are in for a treat with this debut, which invites them to care about the Brennan siblings and to fully invest in their individual and shared stories, which intertwine in surprising ways.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)