The Isle of Youth

Starred review from July 15, 2013
If ever there was a writer going places, it’s Laura Van Den Berg, who follows up her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, with the ambitious, modular The Isle of Youth, whose seven stories are arranged along the themes of family secrets with noirish intrigue. “I Looked for You, I Called Your Name” concerns a couple’s disastrous vacation in South America, where signs and portents stand in for the growing distance between them. These auguries are more literalized in “Acrobat,” where another wife, jilted in Paris, takes up with the titular troupe of performers. The private detective sisters of “Opa-Locka” embroil themselves in other people’s business, only to be dragged back into their father’s criminal past. Meanwhile, the sisters in the book’s title story switch identities and get the full Chandler treatment, trailed by sinister town cars and mystery men. And there’s always the missing family member that can’t be completely grasped. In “The Greatest Escape,” it’s a young girl’s magician father, protected by her mother’s lies; in “Antarctica,” it’s an estranged brother, incinerated in an accident on the Antarctic Peninsula, leaving his sister alone in the frozen wastes with the secret that could have saved him. The Isle of Youth can seem a similarly immutable landscape, but Van Den Berg’s repetitions never annoy; they enchant.

August 1, 2013
A gifted American fiction writer tackles little slivers of crime from the points of view of young women on the verge of self-discovery. Had these hardhearted stories of trespassers, exiles and beautiful losers come from one of the regular blokes, readers would label them noir and call it a day. But in the hands of superlative writer van den Berg (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, 2009), these stories seem to dig a little deeper and resonate a little longer. In the opening story, "I Looked For You, I Called Your Name," a woman on her honeymoon realizes a series of natural disasters is merely a precursor to the looming tragedy of her own marriage. "Opa-Locka" is a traditional private-eye story about two sisters playing detective, waiting to see how the story ends. Two fantastic and very different stories are the collection's highlights. "Lessons" captures a moment in the risky lives of a gang of rural youngsters who have reimagined themselves as stickup artists. "Why didn't they go to school and get regular jobs and get married and live in houses?" it asks. "The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible." Meanwhile, in "Acrobat," a woman whose husband abandons her in Paris falls in with a band of street performers who adopts her as one of their own. In "Antarctica," a rather uncommon housewife travels a vast distance to a remote scientific base at the South Pole to discover how her brother died. "The Greatest Escape" finds a young woman wrestling with the long-ago disappearance of her father. Finally, the title story successfully integrates all of van den Berg's gifts for stories of mistaken identity, unresolved menace and uncomfortable insight. With prose as crisp and cool as that of Richard Lange or Patricia Highsmith, van den Berg is someone to keep track of. A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.

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November 15, 2013
In strange and overwhelming localesswampy Florida, bleaker-than-bleak Antarctica, and a curious South American waterfallvan den Berg (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, 2009) explores the lonely, triumphant sorrow of love and family in this new collection. A mother-daughter magician duo isn't coming close to filling their Hollywood, Florida, shows, so teen Crystal charms wallets out of men at the bar afterward. A band of young cousins, robbing banks in an exultant escape from the freedom of their home-schooled, off-the-grid upbringing, attempts to float just above the law, while a couple of nonlicensed PI sisters grasp at their position questionably under it. In the squirming, electric title story, a woman impersonates her twin sister as a favor, with vertiginous results. Van den Berg sends her characters along the undulations of extraordinary familial relationshipsnavigating their understood strength and, at the same time, arbitrarinessand gathers their piercingly true, hauntingly single voices in this memorable collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)