From the author of 1986's Fighting with Shadows comes this sprawling novel about one Irish couple caught in a labyrinth of love and hate, in a torn nation that publicly mirrors their private strife. Jack, a playwright and fisherman just off the sea, is pining for his girlfriend Catherine and driving himself mad with drink and waiting. Catherine refuses to see him again unless he's sober, but by the time he is, it's too late: She won't take him back. In the middle section of the book, Jack tells Catherine's story before returning to more of his own drunken ramblings. Catherine was born in Northern Ireland to an aging Presbyterian policeman and his Republican, and Methodist, young wife. Jonathan Adams, the father, was a failed minister who joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Ulster has been changing around Adamshis quiet country police station has been transformed into a gated fortressand one day, while assigned to keep the peace during a Republican demonstration, he instead became enraged at a protester, wielded his baton, and instigated a bloody riot. Soon after, his Catholic friend and neighbor hanged himself from a tree. Shocked by what he had become, and contributed to, Adams succumbed to his wife's pleas to buy an old lightkeeper's house on the barren west coast of Ireland as their retreat from violence and the site of Jonathan's attempts at redemption. Jonathan died when Catherine was a young woman, and, meeting Jack Ferris, she quickly shifted her emotional attentions to him. Their relationship became as obsessive as her father's faith, and, stewed in liquor and paranoia, their destruction, like Ireland's, seemed driven by its own startling momentum. Catherine's story is the heart of this novel, with Jack's drunken bookendsoverlong and adding littlesurrounding it. Healy, however, does have an encompassing eye, and a terrific sense of the Irish people and their great good humor. An epic and compelling lament that just goes on a little too long.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-86156-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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