Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
PROFILES
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly...
In a Marin County neighborhood, four women help each other amid marital strife, personal crises and life-altering epiphanies.
For years, Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors Gerri, Andy and Sonja have started most of their days with a brisk walk, but one early spring morning, Andy has had enough with her younger second husband, and she skips the walk and throws him out. It is a loud, angry event, but it is a long time coming, and it sets off a series of surprising upheavals in the lives of her friends. Gerri takes an unplanned trip to her husband’s office in San Francisco, and a conversation with his co-worker makes her question everything she knew about her marriage. Sonja, dedicated to New-Age strategies for health and wellness, is thrown off balance by Andy’s marital strife, then spirals into life-threatening depression when her husband leaves her. As each woman deals with her own personal crossroad, they are collectively drawn to newcomer BJ, who has never shown interest in socializing before but becomes the fresh new pair of eyes that notices change at crucial moments and steps in to help when help is most needed. Hugely popular romance author Carr (The Wanderer, 2013, etc.) steps into women’s fiction territory with this quietly powerful exploration of friendship, marriage and midlife crisis. The characters are realistic and compelling, facing life after 40 with grace, courage and a fierce interpersonal loyalty that is convincing and inspiring. The storyline sounds familiar, yet Carr handles the plot and characters with a deft hand and enough unique twists that we are invested in the characters’ well-beings, and we are touched by their struggles, especially since we see each of them at their best and their worst.
A thought-provoking look at women of a certain age and the choices they make when they realize their lives aren’t exactly what they expected—or thought they were.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1681-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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