Readers willing to be dragged through hell will take Liam to heart.
O’Sullivan’s “fictionalized memoir” chronicles a horror-filled life.
Meet Liam McCarthy, memoirist O’Sullivan’s alter ego, in this, his first writing effort. Young Liam, Irish born and raised, slips into this country on a tourist visa. For the next 400 pages (and about 20 years), we follow Liam through daily hell, much of it of his own making. Not only has he a taste for booze, but he quickly develops a taste for cocaine and Xanax. With little education and having to live below governmental radar, he gets only pickup jobs—plastering, roofing and the like—and many last only a week, if that, though in the Irish underground economy, the lads do (mostly) look out for one another. Housing is another horror: cheap digs with five or six crammed together. What should go toward groceries goes toward beer or drugs. Liam is desperate for a woman but so ashamed of his appearance that he makes do with a notorious inflatable girlfriend. His self-esteem is close to nil and steadily dropping. But slowly, there are hopeful developments. He finds rehab and AA, gets married and is sober for 8 years, a remarkable achievement. Readers root for him. Then the marriage sours, and Liam relapses. But he hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. (Rock bottom is described in the opening chapter; then we flash back to the beginning, in 1985). Liam does find solid redemption or else there would be no story. Of course, he doesn’t become whole and happy overnight, but he has found what blighted his life and the means to begin again. The subject is relentlessly bleak but not so the execution of it. There is even saving humor (but only just). Liam is likable, and the idiomatic Irish voice is strong and direct, with a lilt to it. And the ending is wonderfully handled.
Readers willing to be dragged through hell will take Liam to heart.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615732176
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Sylvie O'
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Although some of the Quinns' problems are resolved, many are not, happily promising a third installment next year.
In a sequel to last year's holiday novel Winter Street, Hilderbrand improves on the first by delving deeper into the emotional lives of the Quinn clan.
A year has elapsed and the events that closed the first novel have developed: thanks to the generous $1 million loan from his first wife, world-renowned newscaster Margaret Quinn, Kelley can keep his Winter Street Inn open, although it's lonelier now that his wife, Mitzi, has left him for George, their one-time holiday Santa. Kelley and Mitzi's son, Bart, is still MIA in Afghanistan, and Mitzi is falling apart; unhappy with George, she spends most days drunk. The lives of Kelley and Margaret's three children are also in crisis. Patrick is now in prison for insider trading, while his wife, Jennifer, tries to hold their family together with the help of illicit prescription pills. Ava seems to have found “the one” with vice principal Scott, if only she could stop thinking about wild Nathaniel. And middle son Kevin has made good with girlfriend Isabelle and their infant, Genevieve. Hopefully he can avoid his first wife, the troubled Norah, who has returned to the island. This year's Winter Stroll, a Nantucket Christmas tradition, coincides with Genevieve's baptism, bringing together all the Quinns and their issues. Also on island for the festivities is Margaret's beau, Drake, a pediatric neurosurgeon and about as perfect as can be, if only Margaret and he could bow out of their schedules and enjoy each other's company. In the ensuing few days, everyone has life-altering decisions to make—even Ava, now that Nathaniel has returned to the island to propose. Only Nantucket itself is left unscathed by the juicy drama. Described in all its magic (after all these years, one hopes Hilderbrand is on the tourist board's payroll), it seems impossible for such turmoil to exist on the charmed island.
Although some of the Quinns' problems are resolved, many are not, happily promising a third installment next year.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-26113-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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