Redeemed from jejune first-novel fatuousness by apt imagery and pervasive wit.
Tragi-comic love life of a young Australian footloose in Japan.
Instead of attending university, Noah Tuttle has come to Tokyo with a fake diploma to scratch out a living as an English teacher. In a run-down, vermin-ridden hostel, he rooms with fellow Aussie Tilly, a sickly girl unforthcoming about her past. Then there’s Mami, a rich girl who lives in a glitzy suite in her father’s high-rise hotel. Tilly longs for an idealized Pacific island, Tuvalu. Rule-eschewing Mami steals, fakes suicide and in general apes the lifestyle of a Japanese SuperFreak. Her serendipitous encounters with Noah always leave him battered, physically and/or emotionally. Both Tilly and Noah are summoned home. Noah’s father, an ex-priest, panics when Noah’s mother becomes a live-in chef for a lesbian sculptor. Tilly’s biologist father is struggling to farm lavender and preserve endangered frogs. Noah and Tilly quarrel and he returns to Tokyo without her, falling once more into Mami’s clutches, and into the money-leaching schemes of scammer entrepreneur Harry. After a lackluster tour of Tokyo’s seedier hostess bars, the action picks up when Tilly returns, to find Noah with Mami. The hostel is being slowly demolished by “Deconstructionists” and its population of stray cats decimated. (Cat lovers, beware of certain pages.) Kicked out by Tilly, Noah is squatting in a nearby apartment mysteriously vacated by their former landlady. Justifiably horrified by the cat carnage, Tilly decamps for Australia for good. (We’ll learn later that her illness was not anorexia, but leukemia.) Mami is collared for shoplifting and goes into family-enforced exile, while Noah becomes embroiled in a marijuana operation with former hostel mate Phillip, a now disfigured ex-model who had “the sort of jaw that propped up whole lines of cologne.” Against his better instincts, Noah embraces Mami as his own personal Tuvalu. The ending, intended to be ambiguous, will not be if “rules” of character consistency hold true.
Redeemed from jejune first-novel fatuousness by apt imagery and pervasive wit.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-74114-871-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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