From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets—for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes.
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated—and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings’ lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother’s goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he’s determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.
Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out—its Edenic lushness and its snakes.
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“Gorgeously told, with psychological nuance to spare, Adrienne Brodeur’s latest fiction returns us to a world she knows by heart, wind-blown, wave-swept Cape Cod and the fraught, labyrinthine territory beneath the surface of family. This is the work of a seasoned and wonderfully wise storyteller. Brodeur is as masterfully attuned to the complex DNA of kindred secrets and high-risk loyalties as she is empathetic to the specifically tangled lives of the Gardner clan. We ultimately want for them what we want for ourselves, the freedom that comes with hard-won healing and truth telling, and the intimacy that waits if we’re brave enough to look back down the loaded barrel of love.”
“Nobody describes the natural beauty of Cape Cod or the lovely, messy bonds of family better than Adrienne Brodeur. Little Monsters is an absolutely captivating read. ”
“Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished, Adrienne Brodeur’s Little Monsters delivers its powerful emotional punches so subtly that they sneak up on you and leave you floored.”
“Little Monsters is an elegant and ambitious novel, a family saga deeply rooted in the landscape of Cape Cod. Adrienne Brodeur writes about complicated, sometimes difficult people and the natural world they inhabit with lyrical precision and deep emotional intelligence.”
“In her first work of fiction following her devastating memoir, Wild Game, Adrienne Brodeur brings to life, with her unerringly sharp eye, another complicated family, populated by brilliant, damaged characters who alternately love and drive each other crazy.
Brodeur conveys a rare understanding of Cape Cod beyond the life of casual summer vacationers—a mysterious and beautiful coastal world where nature, not summer rentals, dominates in all its wonder—and of the demanding, infuriating patriarch who presides over the landscape. She conveys, with rare compassion, how it is possible to love the same people who may have hurt us most—and to forgive them their trespasses.”
“Smart, funny and beautifully written. Brodeur is a brilliant dissector of family relationships, a lyricist of the natural world, and an astute observer of our inner turmoils”
“Who understands complicated family dynamics better than Adrienne Brodeur? Little Monsters is a gripping portrait of how we carry the past into the present, and how the boundaries of kinship blur and change over time.”
“Adrienne Brodeur does family intrigue and dysfunction like no one else I know. In Little Monsters, she once again draws back the curtain on a world of seaside wealth and casual privilege, to reveal a family unraveled by the lies, rivalries, secrets, and silences that have bound it together. Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn’t put it down.”
“I so admire the layered complexity of this beautiful novel about a flawed yet unforgettable family—the interlocking ironies and wounds and strivings for love and clarity and accomplishment and growth, all so deeply embedded in the lush natural world that is The Cape. Every character in this mesmerizing story is distinct and real, and I found myself rooting for them all.”
“Wrenching, psychologically complex, and emotionally satisfying, Little Monsters is an immersive pleasure. This sprawling, big-hearted family saga is about the lies we tell each other and ourselves that enable us to maintain alliances — and what happens when we start telling the truth.”
“In Little Monsters, Adrienne Brodeur plunges into a multi-charactered family novel that is richly satisfying, like the best of meals, taking the reader into the heart of what Freud called ‘the family romance,’ with all its complexities, evasions, buried guilts, forbidden passions and sibling rivalry. As sharply observant about her characters as she is of the landscape and seascape of Cape Cod, where they live, her novel is that rarest of things: a truly great read”
“Adrienne Brodeur weaves a long braid of a tale … the family drama is set in a highly sensory way on the shores of Cape Cod, so much so you’ll feel like your feet are digging into wet summer sand.”
“Written with a palpable love for this family and their Cape Cod home, Little Monsters tackles family trauma, forgiveness, and toxic masculinity.”