The Resolutions
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Three accomplished, globe trotting siblings in crisis take refuge in the last place they would ever expect—back home in Chicago, with one another—in this razor-sharp debut for readers of The Nest, Commonwealth, and Imagine Me Gone
“A vivid literary thrill ride . . . Take the journey. The pages will fly by.”—Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook
The three Brennan siblings are well on their way in the world. Samantha, the youngest, is a ballerina who recently joined the ranks of a Russian dance company; her brother Jonah is a grad student studying elephants in the rainforest of Gabon; and the eldest, Gavin, has stayed closer to home, living in Los Angeles and acting in a television series.
But as the holidays draw near, all three find themselves in profoundly troubling, though distinctly different, predicaments. Samantha is losing the battle to keep her drug addiction from ruining her career; Jonah, in his attempts to protect his elephants, gets in way too deep with a gang of ivory poachers; and Gavin’s TV show is canceled the same day his girlfriend moves out.
With their lives run aground, they reunite in their parents’ home for the holidays, where they discover that the bonds between siblings are unshakable. But with their personal problems threatening to derail their nascent careers and possibly their very survival, the three embark on a trip to West Africa in a perilous attempt to right their crooked paths.
The Resolutions is a contemporary look at three young people in the defining moments of their lives, by a talented author just getting started on a promising literary career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.