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.
Tensely constructed and absorbing ... It’s a juicy story. Brodeur’s engaging portrait of this family is aided by her facility at dropping in and out of the voices of her sharply discerned characters. The book is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of five narrators ... Brodeur has indeed crafted a consummate summer read with Little Monsters, which somehow evokes smooth beach glass and hot pink sunsets with nary a mention of either.
This smart, page-flipping novel has more secrets than you could successfully hide from your Sunday school teacher ... The strengths of this novel, and there are many, lie in the detailed writing about aquatic life, sea creatures, and the Cape Cod setting. Additionally, Adam’s bipolar-driven delusions of grandeur, and his internal rants at intimations of his mortality, are darkly funny and poignant ... But as troubling as the book’s family secrets are, the dynamics are too boiled down and oversimplified in the end. Still, with some winning characters and a page-turning plot — grounded in Brodeur’s love and knowledge of the Cape Cod where she grew up and lives part time when not in Cambridge — Little Monsters offers the pleasures of a smart, absorbing debut novel despite some clumsiness.
Cleverly calculated to push all the buttons for a wide swath of women ... The time frame of this engaging, neatly plotted novel distinguishes it, serving as the emotional underpinning of the action ... As I raced happily through the pages, I wondered how the book would work without Brodeur’s highly specific framing ... Brodeur is very deliberately examining a small family horror story within a larger political context. Maybe in taking us back to an age of relative innocence, optimism and complacency, she’s taunting her readers a little. Or maybe she’s giving us a pep talk.
