by Lara McLaughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2011
A tour de force that makes readers face hard truths about the effect a person’s choices can have on her soul.
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McLaughlin invites readers on a journey of the heart in this celebration of life, death and what it means to be human.
After fighting cancer for a year, teenage Amy finally starts to feel better. Then she dies in a tragic accident. Her mother Jane feels so much guilt that she lets her daughter’s death tear her life apart. One year after Amy’s death, Jane’s husband has left her and her son spends a lot of time with his dad, leaving Jane alone for days at a time. She passes these days with human-rights photographer Riva Hakim, whom is dying. Riva is also the wife of the late professor who was Amy’s biological father. While Jane has begun to deal with the guilt she feels over Amy’s death, she still has a long way to go when we first meet her. Riva, for her part, is trying to die well, and that includes forgiving the man who cheated on her as a course of habit, and opening up to a friendship with Jane as well as putting down her camera to write her memoirs. As she writes, Riva remembers the places she’s seen in the world—the trauma, tragedy and joy—and fights to see how these things have changed her. Her faith in God brings her peace during this difficult time, and she tries to lead Jane to that peace as well. As the two women journey, together and separate, they learn how to make peace with their pasts and how to go on into the future, whatever it asks of them. They learn that a dream can be a downfall, that endings are also beginnings and that what God has in store for a life may not be what the liver of that life always thought they wanted. McLaughlin’s storytelling is superb, deftly handling both women’s stories and the transitions between them, allowing readers to easily follow along. She also expertly handles emotions, making Jane and Riva’s grief, loss, anger and joy palpable.
A tour de force that makes readers face hard truths about the effect a person’s choices can have on her soul.Pub Date: June 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456354626
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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