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THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED

Name: THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED
Author: Catherine Dunne
ISBN: 9781501135668

by Catherine Dunne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

Lived-in, hard-earned feminism swirled with a noir tone and dark turns makes for a great read.

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Irish novelist Dunne makes her U.S. debut with this intricate saga.

The title of this novel is a puzzle. Which of the events or choices to be found here answers the question: followed what? The first and splashiest is a double murder—a hit—ordered by one of the two female protagonists, Calista, and discovered by the other, Pilar. The concern of the book, though, is not what follows this particular piece of violence but what caused it and what connects the two women despite their separate lives. Calista is from Dublin, the daughter of a wealthy Irish businessman and a well-bred Spanish mother. In 1966, when she's 17, she's seduced by 30-year-old Alexandros, an associate of her father’s, becomes pregnant, and is made to marry him and move to his family home in Cyprus. This is an old tale, but Dunne reveals the brutal power of the seduction—the way, when Alexandros forces himself on Calista, she convinces herself it's love. Pilar’s story echoes Calista’s in looping, interesting ways. She comes from a poor background in the Spanish countryside but, with fierce, cagey tenacity, crafts a life for herself in Madrid, coming to own and run the high-class apartment building where a murder will one day take place. Unlike her own mother, and unlike Calista in a nearby part of the world, Pilar is never abused by men. Nonetheless, she finds herself pregnant with few options and little support. The redemptive qualities of children (and the devastation that comes with their loss) factor into all the lives in this tale. Calista and Pilar are wonderful characters to watch develop as they weather this theme and as they work to define and enrich themselves against steep, cruel odds.

Lived-in, hard-earned feminism swirled with a noir tone and dark turns makes for a great read.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 9781501135668

Page Count: 352

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-374-27912-7

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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LONG BRIGHT RIVER

by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2020

With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.

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A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.

The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.

With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.