Solid civil rights–era fiction; well worth a read.
A coming-of-age novel set in the rural South during the civil rights era.
Orphaned as a boy and raised by Aunt Ethel and Uncle Gordon in a small town outside of New Orleans, John W. Archer is small and serious and sees himself as different from everyone else. His best friend is the similarly disenfranchised Crawford Smith. Despite their mutual aloofness, they develop a firm friendship and become brothers “in every way that matters.” After a slow start to the novel—which in retrospect seems designed to sketch out the architecture of the boys’ friendship but is nevertheless, on first reading, a bit unfocused—the narrative zeroes in on Crawford’s complicated relationship with his uncle Hal Crawford and the complexities of both boys’ love interests. Hal is an outlier in their small town, living in “nigger town” and working as a civil rights lawyer during a time when segregation was the law and lynchings were not yet a thing of the past. Both boys are smart and honorable, and they see that the way things are is not the way they should be. Still, they struggle with whether their future is—like Hal’s—to stay and live and love within their imperfect world, striving in some way to improve it, or to escape, via college, to a more progressive world. The answers aren’t obvious, and in fact, the boys’ choices flip-flop as they struggle to be true to themselves and to live within the expectations handed down to them by teachers, girlfriends, parents, the formidable Aunt Ethel, and Hal, who, for all his talk about following one’s own path, is ultimately more interested in having others follow his path. Cheevers (The Able Seaman’s Mate, 2013, etc.) has a gift for dialogue, and much of the novel is composed of animated, often funny, back and forth between John, Crawford, and Hal. He’s less skilled with moments of action, focusing somewhat dispassionately, for instance, on the logistics of the novel’s climactic scene, to the extent that it reads like a series of stage directions: so-and-so raises his hand to strike, such-and-such dodges, so-and-so gets in between, such-and-such holds so-and-so back. Still, Cheever deals effectively with big ideas, and his characters are both authentic and sympathetic, investing the reader in the choices that they make and the ways they test and express their loyalties to each other and to the world around them.
Solid civil rights–era fiction; well worth a read.Pub Date: July 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500485276
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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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