When Coughlan eases up on the cleverness and shows his heart, his unique imagination shines through—but unfortunately, this...
Very brief stories with an absurdist flair comprise this debut collection from Ireland.
Coughlan’s first book is full of men coming up on middle age who find themselves in bizarre circumstances. “Human Butterfly” features a company employee who decides to confront his office naked after being newly fired. In “Re-Union,” a husband and father must deal with a surprise nocturnal visit from some drunken school chums. The male protagonist in the distressing “Ill Conceived” falls pregnant from his wife and gives birth to an alarm clock through his anus. This latter detail gives a clear sense of where Coughlan’s humor lies, and when given the choice between writing from the heart or landing a pun, Coughlan will almost always choose the latter. (One story is called “Interview with a Campfire.”) Puns are not the only quirk of style here. The stories are heavily descriptive and lightly plotted. Sometimes this works, as in the opening story, “A Nuisance,” in which a teenage girl spends long paragraphs trying to kill a fly only to later find herself in a similarly hunted position in the car of an older man. Sometimes it creates stories that seem to be, like Seinfeld, about nothing, as in “Enhanced Forgiveness,” about a man who buys a new golf club and…goes golfing. With an average page count clocking in around 10, Coughlan’s stories, with their antic energy and over-the-top premises, can feel a little like the bumper cars he describes in the final story, “F-unfair,” “with a madman at the controls sending you head-first into a collision that will wipe the smile off the faces of everyone involved.”
When Coughlan eases up on the cleverness and shows his heart, his unique imagination shines through—but unfortunately, this happens too rarely here.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987508-3-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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