The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight through the colorful stories of some of its inhabitants.
A sensitive young man shares his memories of growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Though it wouldn’t rank high on any list of well-known literary destinations, Halifax provides a fertile field for Pugsley’s collection of 14 linked stories about his eponymous narrator’s life there from childhood through his early 20s in the mid-1980s. Evoking comparisons in both style and substance to the work of John Irving and Robertson Davies in its assemblage of perceptive, richly detailed character studies, Pugsley’s book succeeds in the task the author sets for his narrator—“to give expression to the lives I encountered, and to make sense of some of the mysteries that seemed to me the city’s truths.” Among the most affecting entries are “Karin,” the story of a young woman with “a knack for making a man feel most alive in her company,” and “Tempest,” the dramatic account of a December hurricane and its tragic consequences in the lives of two of Aubrey McKee’s closest friends. In “Fudge,” Aubrey focuses an unsparing lens on his own life, describing his youthful excursions into his hometown’s outlaw fringe, including drug dealing under the tutelage of the terrifying older teenager Howard Fudge, who served as his “ferryman into these underworld ports of call.” One of McKee’s preoccupations is his friend Cyrus Mair—“whiz kid, recluse, and weirdo”—the scion of a once prominent Halifax family whose spectacular descent into shame and ruin he recounts in the story “Death by Drowning.” It’s too early to tell whether Pugsley will be able to mine sufficient narrative gold from Aubrey McKee’s life for a projected five volumes of autobiographical fiction, but on the evidence of this first entry, there’s good reason to hope there will be more engaging stories like these in the offing.
The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight through the colorful stories of some of its inhabitants.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-311-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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