Signal Fires

May 1, 2022

In 1985, a car crash leaves a young woman dead, three teenagers traumatized, and the Wilf family with hearts shuttered forever. Decades later, a lonely child whose parents have just moved in across the street befriends retired doctor Ben Wilf, struggling with buried secrets and his wife's final illness. From novelist/memoirist Shapiro (Inheritance).

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2022
Two families in suburban New York weather crisscrossing births and deaths, losses and rebounds. Shapiro, who made a splash with her gripping genealogy memoir, Inheritance (2019), returns to fiction with this moody, meditative novel, her 11th book. The story opens in 1985. Fifteen-year-old Theo Wilf is driving the family car; his older sister, Sarah, riding shotgun, has been drinking; their friend in the back seat is killed in a wreck right in front of their house. To protect her brother, Sarah claims she was at the wheel. Surprisingly, considering it gets our attention with this super-plotty device, the book is actually more concerned with character development and metaphysical questions than event-driven storytelling. To understand the effects of the tragedy on the siblings, their parents, and the universe, we are guided by an omniscient narrator to moments in 2010, 1999, 2020, 2014, and 1970; Sarah becomes a screenwriter with addiction problems; Theo, a tortured master chef. The book's anti-chronological structure reflects the yearning, felt by both the characters and their rather insistent narrator, toward the epiphanic idea that everything is connected; nothing and no one is ever truly lost. Across the street from the Wilfs are the Shenkmans--and it's a good thing for them, since paterfamilias Dr. Wilf will deliver baby Waldo, premature and wrapped in his cord, on the kitchen floor on New Year's Eve of Y2K. Theo and Waldo will share a lifelong connection; at 9, Waldo will show him an app he loves that charts constellations and geography. This app becomes a literal bridge between the loneliness of modern suburban living and the book's dream of connectivity. "The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here." Wears its philosophical intentions on its sleeve; well-developed characters and their interesting careers seal the deal.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 8, 2022
Shapiro returns after the memoir Inheritance with a beautiful exploration of the connections between two families and the reverberations from a teenager’s lie. In 1985 Avalon, N.Y., 15-year-old Theo Wilf drives his 17-year-old sister Sarah and her friend Misty home after a night of partying. After he accidentally drops the car lighter down his shirt, he crashes the car into the tree in front of their house. Ben, Theo and Sarah’s surgeon father, rushes to save Misty’s life, but fails, and in an impulsive decision, Sarah tells Ben that she was driving. Then, in 1999, shortly after the Shenkman family moves in across the street, Ben helps deliver their infant, Waldo, during an emergency birth. Shapiro continues to jump around in time, unspooling the consequences of these two fateful nights “like so many wobbly tops set spinning.” As Theo becomes a chef and Sarah a screenwriter, both wrestle with their guilt, while Ben, who never really gets to know the Shenkmans, is left alone to deal with his wife’s dementia and develops a bond with Waldo in 2010. Shapiro imagines in luminous prose how each of the characters’ lives might have gone if things had turned out differently. It’s an intriguing meditation. Agent: Margaret Riley King, WME.

August 1, 2022

In the summer of 1985, the Wilfs--Ben, a doctor; his wife, Mimi; and their teenage children, Sarah and Theo--go from idyllic family closeness to a fractured unit in an instant. The fallout from a catastrophic car crash involving Sarah and Theo is made worse by the family's decision never to speak of it. Over time, Sarah moves to California, juggling a successful career as a movie producer with the demands of her own family. Theo, after years cut off from his parents and sister, now owns an exclusive restaurant in Brooklyn. Ben is left to manage his beloved Mimi's advancing dementia, finally moving her to a nearby nursing home. The one bright spot in Ben's life is his conversations with neighbor Waldo Shenkman, whose life was saved by Ben when Waldo's mother went into labor at home during a snowstorm. Now ten years old, smart but socially awkward Waldo, whose interest in astronomy enrages his controlling father, finds solace in his visits with Ben until twin disasters put the two families on a collision course. VERDICT Creator of the popular podcast Family Secrets, acclaimed novelist/memoirist Shapiro (Inheritance) writes with compassion and a deep understanding of the damage that secrets wreak. Shapiro's first novel in 15 years was well worth the wait.--Beth E. Andersen

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2022
From Waldo Shenkman's premature birth under the care of Dr. Benjamin Wilf to Mimi Wilf's poignant death in Waldo's arms 11 years later, the lives of these neighboring families in a stolid upstate New York community are not as close as such events would suggest. When the Wilfs' teenage children, Sarah and Theo, cause an accident that takes the life of a classmate, their world understandably constricts as each teen moves as far away from Avalon as possible. Waldo's world has never been about the here-and-now. A savant obsessed with astronomy, Waldo navigates distant stars and galaxies more comfortably than he does the streets of his town or family relationships. Like creating an intricate origami puzzle, Shapiro folds together the events that define these lives over decades, focusing on specific interludes to divulge old secrets or bury new ones. Returning to fiction after touching readers with her courageous and probing memoirs, including Inheritance (2019), Shapiro delivers keen perceptions about family dynamics via fictional characters that exude a rare combination of substance and delicacy. Stunning in depth and breadth, this luminous examination of loss and acceptance, furtiveness and reliability, abandonment and friendship ultimately blazes with profound revelations.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.