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RUBY’S SPOON

A spellbinding first novel, distinguished by unforgettable storytelling.

Residents of a dying industrial town in northern England blame a mysterious outsider for their increasing troubles.

The year is 1933. Motherless 13-year-old Ruby lives in Cradle Cross with her gruffly overprotective grandmother Annie. Long ago, Annie lost her husband and baby in a shipwreck. Terrified after Ruby’s father took her on a potentially dangerous sea outing, Annie forbade the girl to go into water or even to cross the canals that make Cradle Cross an inland island. Since then, Ruby’s father has lived alone on his boat; Ruby sees him daily from shore but has not felt his touch for years. With the adults around her unable to articulate their affection, desperately lonely Ruby yearns to escape to the sea. Then exotic, mysterious Isa Fly shows up, saying that her dying father Moonie has sent her from their seaside home to find her long-lost sister Lily. No one has heard of Moonie Fly, and the local women suspect that Isa, with her white skin, wild hair and one blind eye, is a witch. Ruby has her own suspicions, but she’s drawn to the visitor’s magnetic personality and convinces herself that Isa will take her back to the sea if she helps find Lily. Also drawn to Isa, in adult ways Ruby only partly understands, are Annie’s devoted friend Captin, who employs Ruby in his fish restaurant, and worldly, educated Truda Blick, newly in charge of Blicks’ Button Factory, the town’s primary employer. When Truda takes drastic measures to stave off the factory’s collapse, townspeople assume that her desperate belt-tightening stems from meanness. Meanwhile, they blame Isa when items begin to go missing. The local dialect takes a little getting used to, but it nails the characterizations. What begins as a charming tale of mermaid myths and regional superstition evolves into a heartbreakingly realistic account of social upheaval and family tragedy.

A spellbinding first novel, distinguished by unforgettable storytelling.

Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6868-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009

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THE SECRET HISTORY

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

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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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