A straightforward, engaging tale about finding a meaningful friendship late in life.
A novel focuses on a grieving widow who finds an unlikely second chance to embrace life.
This tale opens on a memorably stark note: the moment when 14-year-old Maureen Bower’s working-class father leaves their family and commits suicide. In a particularly jarring scene, she’s actually the one who discovers his body hanging from a tree in Highland Park. Naturally enough, the incident scars her psychologically, deepening her fear of abandonment until she meets a confident and high-spirited man named Frank Russo, who asks her to dance at the Cypress Avenue Roller Rink. Frank, a vibrant figure who, a character says, “could never be just another face in the crowd,” brings complicated vigor to Maureen’s life, and a chunk of the novel’s narrative details their relationship. When Frank dies, the wounds of losing her father are reopened, and she withdraws from society. Her unhealthy isolation is shattered by her deepening friendship with an unconventional woman named Doris Cantrell, whose outsized personality has developed as a response to her own psychological traumas while growing up. Doris is abrasive and outspoken, and although she’s kind in her gruff way, she shows little patience for Maureen’s habitual references to her long marriage to Frank and her ongoing bereavement. From the beginning, Maureen senses hidden dimensions in Doris. In direct and largely unadorned prose (that sometimes reads a trifle flat), Miceli (Amanda’s Room, 2012) skillfully charts the deepening of this odd friendship, with Doris and her own familial strife serving to draw Maureen out of a downward spiral that may well have had her following her father’s dark path. Instead of just wallowing in her sorrow, Maureen tries to figure out Doris’ troubled history: “I felt certain that underlying her anger was a deep pool of sadness. What life experiences had ingrained such hostility in my strange new friend?” The fine emotional gradations in the deepening friendship between the two women are smoothly handled and boldly venture into dramatic territory seldom dealt with in contemporary fiction.
A straightforward, engaging tale about finding a meaningful friendship late in life.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9976986-5-7
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Elm Hill
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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