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. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Categories: SHORT STORIES | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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