by Robert Crooke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2014
A human story about truth, beauty and the limitations of love.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
A novel of hope, fiction, love and duty, set in a time of great uncertainty.
In 2007, Alice Winslow, a professor at a small liberal arts university, has done what few before her have been able to do: She’s published a deeply moving piece of literary fiction that’s also a New York Times best-seller. What should be a grand achievement for Alice, however, is quickly compromised when an accidental run-in with a political activist at a television studio thrusts Alice, quite literally, into the spotlight. She’s already in hot water with some people in her department, so this new association threatens to shatter the fragile life she’s built. Things aren’t much easier for Alice’s husband, Tom, a newspaperman who’s facing not only devastating cuts following a corporate buyout, but also the legacy of a decision he made long ago. Her son, Will, likewise struggles in a relationship. In fact, the whole social fabric of the town seems to be wearing thin, creating an atmosphere ready for a crisis. Crooke expertly weaves together the various plot strands, drawing on the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks and the economic collapse of 2008 to tell a richly detailed, poignantly observed story. At one point, for example, Alice reflects on the message of a novel that a colleague shared with her: “[L]ife is a tenuous balance of love and fate...hope is a fiction made plausible by our choices.” It’s an observation that sums up the overall tone of the novel: Crooke explores what it means to love but also what it means to endure—what life throws our way, as well as the choices we make. As Alice’s story unfolds in the public eye, readers witness one person’s struggle for clarity, compassion and the truth, but they also see the machinations of a society wrestling to come to terms with a new, unfamiliar world. It’s a struggle that transcends the page and has implications for contemporary society.
A human story about truth, beauty and the limitations of love.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491749883
Page Count: 320
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mark Z. Danielewski
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
20
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2019
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Sally Rooney
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.