To think, so many people were desperate to get their hands on a bottle of Ritalin or Adderall, and Adam was lucky enough to have a built-in supply.

In particular, therapy sessions between Ken and his psychoanalyst, George, are beautifully illuminated.Bonus points if you reference some of the “comps” to which Rachel compares Abby’s art when she visits Arcadia in the beginning of the novel.

With a spring in his step, he climbed into his beloved 2002 Subaru, patted the steering wheel, and noted with satisfaction that the odometer had just passed 208,000 miles. They keep the seething caldron of their history barely tamped down while warily staying in each other’s orbit, due in part to the remote artist’s studio tucked back on the sand dunes that their deceased mother Emily owned, in which Abby now lives and works, and which was left to Ken before Abby was born. A familial drama with alternating POV’s that traverses their lives but doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. It would only get worse in the coming months when knuckleheads from around the country descended on Cape Cod for their summer vacations, cars loaded down with bikes, surfboards, and diapered toddlers. His two adult children, whom Adam raised alone after the death of his beloved first wife, are each planning an elaborate gift for him.Adrienne Brodeur’s “Little Monsters” is cleverly calculated to push all the buttons for a wide swath of women. Cowley Heller, who inflicted multiple highly descriptive scenes of child sexual assault on me, has not demonstrated an ability to do that. He awoke daily to random words, incoherent thoughts, and fleeting images, convinced that their meaning, though not yet clear, would develop in the gelatin silver process of his mind.