Strangers at the Feast

Hosting a family dinner at Thanksgiving, anthropology professor Ginny Olson is disorganized and only marginally hospitable. Renée Raudman narrates this novel in a slow, sonorous manner. Haughty characters, mismatched conversation, and dysfunctional relations open this family saga. In scene after scene, Raudman keeps pace with the complaints and the whining, the dissatisfaction of each person's life. Telling the story from different characters' perspectives, Raudman struggles to keep the listener engaged with any of them. But the listener who has the patience to slog through the endless character development and internal dialogue will finally hear Raudman shift into a dramatic crescendo when the Olsons' world falls apart and the story takes off. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

June 21, 2010
An unhappy family creeps toward a violent tragedy in Vanderbes's misfired sophomore novel (after Easter Island). Every one of the Olsons who gather on Thanksgiving Day, 2007, has issues. Matriarch Eleanor, adrift after years of ministering to a husband who never recovered from his Vietnam war experience, is flummoxed by her children's choices: her unmarried college professor daughter, Ginny, has just adopted a mute Indian girl, and son Douglas is up to his neck in the real estate bubble, prompting the ire of his wife, Denise, who can barely stand the ineptitude of Ginny's attempt at cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Then there's Kijo, who is out for revenge after one of Douglas's real estate deals gets his grandmother's home condemned. When Ginny's oven fails and the Olsen family decamps to Denise and Douglas's McMansion, the catastrophe that ensues will, of course, change and bind the lives of everyone involved. But without the love story, historical intrigue, and exotic locale of Easter Island, Vanderbes spins her wheels on a toothless Corrections-lite family saga that winds its way to an ever-so-unlikely big bang conclusion.