Publisher's Synopsis
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 - Monica Ali
Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn't put it down. 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 unravelled by the lies, rivalries, secrets, and silences that have bound it together - Ruth Ozeki
A riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families and long-buried secrets
Ken and Abby Gardner were raised in a remote home on Cape Cod. As adults, their relationship is strained, but their lives are still deeply intertwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family, but when his wife walks in on him in an internet chatroom, she demands they go to therapy. Abby is a talented artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them as a single parent. As his seventieth birthday approaches and he begins to stare down his mortality, he comes off his bipolar disorder medication in order to make one last scienti?c breakthrough; he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children.
Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harbouring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family - Steph, who doesn't make her connection known.
Set over one fraught summer, 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.
