Good Neighbors: A Novel

by Joanne Serling

Overview

A searing portrait of suburbia, friendship, and family strained by a devotion to false appearances.

In an idyllic suburb, four young families quickly form a neighborhood clique, their friendships based on little more than the ages of their children and a shared sense of camaraderie. When one of the couples, Paige and Gene Edwards, adopt a four-year-old girl from Russia, the group's loyalty and morality is soon called into question. Are the Edwards unkind to their new daughter? Or is she a difficult child with hidden destructive tendencies?

As the seams of the group friendship slowly unravel, neighbor Nicole Westerhof finds herself drawn further into the life of the adopted girl, forcing Nicole to re-examine the deceptive nature of her own family ties, and her complicity in the events unfolding around her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455541911
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Joanne Serling's fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New Ohio Review and North American Review. She is a graduate of Cornell University and studied and taught fiction at The Writers Studio in New York City. She lives outside of New York with her husband and children and is at work on her second book.

Editorial Reviews

11/06/2017
In Serling’s suspenseful debut, four privileged families in an upscale Boston suburb do their best to maintain the fiction that their lives are perfect. The strain increases when one of their number, unstable Paige, adopts a preschooler from Russia, which results in unhappiness for all involved. Narrator Nicole, who is hiding from public knowledge a deadbeat alcoholic sister and a diabetic mother back in Ohio, is drawn to adopted Winnie as she becomes frustrated with her two school-age sons. As Paige becomes more reclusive, the others in the group begin to take sides, some arguing that Paige is abusing her new daughter and some that the little girl is troubled in ways that few would be able to handle. Serling succeeds at dialing up a sense of dread: Nicole is far from a reliable narrator, and with all the other characters keeping their secrets close to their chests, much is left unrevealed. While many novels have tackled the subject of suburban secrets and unease, this one excels in particular at exploring the bonds among families. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"I haven't been captivated by a story like this in so long. The tension, the complexity, the obsession over status; how one hopes to be seen by others versus how one fears one is seen...GOOD NEIGHBORS is a stunning, shocking, entertaining, and thought-provoking look at humanity. I want everyone to read this book."—Julia Fierro, author of The Gypsy Moth Mother and Cutting Teeth

"Riveting...GOOD NEIGHBORS exposes the dark underbelly of seemingly perfect families and friendships in this compulsively paced suburban thriller."—Bethany Ball, author of What To Do About The Solomons

"GOOD NEIGHBORS is a novel for everyone who's ever wondered what's really behind the smiling cohesion of other people's holiday cards and Facebook posts. Perhaps its highest achievement is to make us laugh, think, and tremble at the same time."—Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours, The Virgins and The Understory

"[An] ice-pick of a debut novel...elegant but savage...GOOD NEIGHBORS is first-rate suburbs-fiction. A steely writing performance, the kind that will leave readers watchful for another novel from this author."—Open Letters Review

"While many novels have tackled the subject of suburban secrets and unease, [GOOD NEIGHBORS] excels in particular at exploring the bonds among families. "—Publishers Weekly

"[Serling] writes with verve and frequent insight... A spicy stew of suburban discontent."—Kirkus

From the Publisher

2017-11-14
An international adoption falters, splintering a coterie of rich suburban friends.When a narrator begins with "We were modest. We were moneyed. We were all of us self-made and the most successful siblings of our respective families," the reader knows there is trouble ahead. The storyteller is Nicole Westerhof, a married Boston suburbanite with two grade-school sons who's on hiatus as a writer and riddled with insecurities. (First-time novelist Serling is a married mother of two in suburban New Jersey.) The prologue is called "What We Thought We Knew" and the epilogue, "What We Knew." The space in between consists of a slow awakening to the folly of turning one's clique of friends into a substitute family for "alleviating the boredom and the isolation of middle age." The fault line appears in the second chapter, when Paige and Gene Edwards, the wealthiest among the group, announce they are adopting a preschooler from Russia. The brittle, imperious Paige and the less-distinctly drawn Gene return from Moscow with a girl they name Winifred Leigh Edwards, whose lazy eye is the first of a string of impairments. Nicole is smitten; Paige—thin, glamorous, and icy in her prematurely white hair—decidedly less so. The Edwards' friends begin to glimpse cruelty, to suspect neglect and eventually "the black trickle of something dangerous." Nicole is bracketed between her fierce preoccupation with Winnie and her efforts to keep a distance, via the phone, from an alcoholic sister back in Ohio. Serling, who favors sentence fragments, writes with verve and frequent insight: a happy memory "rising up like a swarm of mosquitoes. Almost painful." But even as she ratchets the tension, her characters become increasingly hard to care about, particularly the husbands. This weakens the novel's twist ending. Serling lands on a lethal climax among the privileged, in the vein of Big Little Lies.A spicy stew of suburban discontent is diluted by the thinness of its characters.

Kirkus Reviews