A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.
In this novel, a rebellious teen conducts soul-searching with the help of her great-grandmother’s diary.
Seventeen-year-old Delia Elliot of Rochester, New York, has ended her junior year of high school with her social life in shambles. After Greg Ashworth, her ex-boyfriend, shared private photographs of her with their classmates, Delia began a run of delinquent behavior. Now she’s been fired from her restaurant job and her mom, Heather, has decided to make her clean the attic of their dilapidated family home. In the midst of this task, Delia finds the diary of her great-grandmother Didi Diamond, dating from 1932. The teen reads about life during the Depression and Didi’s courtship with a young man called Paul. Delia is immediately stirred by the mystery of Paul’s presence since her great-grandfather’s name was Ron. Meanwhile, Heather feels invisible and craves a midlife boost in both her romantic situation and career. It doesn’t help that her ex-husband, Johnston, is happily remarried. She turns to Brian Napier, an occasional fling with whom she’s afraid to get too serious, for extra courage. Seeing progress with the attic, Heather loosens Delia’s house arrest. The teen begins falling for her neighbor Jake Freimuth, who’s nothing like the abusive Greg. As the rift between Delia and Heather starts to heal, with help from Didi’s diary, the pair feel ready to face anything. Barker knows this is the perfect moment to upend her characters’ lives. For the opening two-thirds of the dynamic story, chapters narrated by Delia and Heather alternate, with portions of Didi’s diary included. Events proceed loosely, and those of greatest import are interior to the mother’s and daughter’s lives. Heather decides to take on the challenge of becoming a real estate agent, for example. When Delia learns that her mother had a troubled childhood and spent time in foster homes, she realizes that Heather is “separate and distinct from me” and “lived an entire life before I came along.” When tragedy strikes toward the engaging novel’s end, the author toys with readers’ expectations since real life sometimes doesn’t provide closure. Ultimately, the tender finale will comfort audiences.
A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73535-811-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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