Overview
On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events bring these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life.
In her gripping new book, Jennifer Vanderbes masterfully lays bare the fraught lives of this complex cast of characters and the lengths to which they will go to protect their families. Strangers at the Feast is at once a heartbreaking portrait of a family struggling to find happiness and an exploration of the hidden costs of the American dream.
Published to international acclaim, Jennifer Vanderbes’s first book, Easter Island, was hailed as “one of those rare novels that appeals equally to heart, mind, and soul,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. In her second novel, this powerful writer reaches new heights of storytelling. This page-turner wrestles with the most important issues of our time—race, class, and above all else, family. Strangers at the Feast will leave readers haunted and deeply affected.
Synopsis
The critically acclaimed author of Easter Island delivers a gripping, complex, and satisfying drama that unfolds over the course of Thanksgiving Day as two families are connected by a horrific crime.
The Washington Post - Valerie Sayers
Although Vanderbes announces impending disaster early on, the denouement is still tense and surprising, and the novel is ultimately compelling. It's punctuated with sharp observations about class and race, about the winners and losers in America's power grabs, and about the ways a family can play out a culture's conflicts.
Editorials
Library Journal
No one would expect the Olsons to be involved in a bloody crime dubbed the Thanksgiving Day Massacre. But as the events of that day slowly unfold, we learn how the choices of each family member contribute to the tragedies that follow. There is Gavin, the Olson patriarch whose long-ago decision to fight in Vietnam results in present-day strained relationships and a dead-end insurance job; Eleanor, his wife, whose persistent show of false cheer causes her to snap; their two grown children, Douglas, an overconfident real estate investor whose risky decisions destroy all he holds dear, and Ginny, an academic who impulsively and illegally adopts a mute Indian girl. We also encounter Kijo, a young man from the projects whose intention to send a strong message to the man responsible for razing his home goes horribly wrong. VERDICT Vanderbes (Easter Island) has written an absorbing and suspenseful story about the dynamics of family, generational misunderstandings, and the desperate ways one copes with both the arbitrariness of fate and the consequences of one's choices. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/10.]—Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CAValerie Sayers
Although Vanderbes announces impending disaster early on, the denouement is still tense and surprising, and the novel is ultimately compelling. It's punctuated with sharp observations about class and race, about the winners and losers in America's power grabs, and about the ways a family can play out a culture's conflicts.—The Washington Post