A fresh take on forbidden love and forgiveness with warm, winning characters.
Gormly’s enjoyable debut novel explores the political, religious and social dynamics of rural life in fictional Tysen, Mo., during the summer of 1950.
Naomi Hollister’s husband, Russell, disappeared 12 years ago, leaving her a $1,000 check, his orphaned, 5-year-old nephew, Johnny, and the large house he grew up in. To survive and provide for Johnny, Naomi opened a small hotel, which gave her the ability to send Johnny to Missouri University in the fall. It also introduced her to Matt Neyerson, a sturdy and dependable boarder who knows “when to put down the newspaper.” Busby Howard, the local reverend, spews “hellfire and sparks” from the pulpit of the Baptist church, denouncing Johnny and Naomi for their association with Ray Redeem, a misunderstood troublemaker with plans to marry Alice Tolney, despite the previous arrangements Alice’s father made with wealthy Sample Forney. Howard’s proclamations spark a divide within the church and, ultimately, the entire town. Re-enter Russell, once “all splash and dance,” now sick with cancer and guilt, ready to share the truth about his desertion. Gormly’s multilayered narrative avoids melodrama and flows with ease, using the sights and sounds of an unfolding summer to allow the action to bloom. Precise period details and colloquialisms evoke an era of multiparty telephone lines, railroad travel and pie auctions. The omniscient narrator effectively portrays the interactions of Tysen’s citizens, such as Doobie Prat, who’d “never been a mean drunk, just a persistent one,” “railroad mistress” Bertie Reardon and Matilda and Albert St. John, the town eccentrics, who show up for Saturday night movies in the school gym wearing formal attire. With an easy touch, Gormly sheds light on their divided souls—whether they be “sprinklers” or “fish eaters,” in preacher Busby’s parlance for Methodists and Roman Catholics—and shows how redemption and acceptance can triumph over righteousness and ignorance.
A fresh take on forbidden love and forgiveness with warm, winning characters.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475933628
Page Count: 306
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2012
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
A charming and incisive debut.
Four young nuns wind up running a halfway house full of quirky characters in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Four Catholic sisters live with the elderly Sister Roberta in upstate New York. All on the edge of turning 30, the young women are at loose ends: Their day care is shuttered, and Sister Roberta is retiring. However, the four women refuse to be parted: “We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth; Mary Lucille, the heart; Therese, the legs. And I, Agatha, the eyes.” Eventually, the Buffalo diocese decides to transfer them to Rhode Island, where they are put in charge of running Little Neon, a “Mountain Dew”–colored house for residents trying to get sober and get back on their feet. When the local Catholic high school needs someone to teach geometry, the sisters volunteer Agatha, who is labelled as the quietest but the smartest of the quartet. As Agatha immerses herself in her new life, she finds the residents of Little Neon, from parolee Baby to Tim Gary, whose disfigured jaw prevents him from finding love, open her eyes to new realities, as do her colleagues and students at the high school. Eventually, Agatha can no longer ignore that the church, and most of all she herself, is changing. Luchette’s novel, her first, is structured in small chapters that feel like vignettes from a slightly wacky indie film. The book is frequently vibrant with resonant images: Agatha learning to roller skate in Little Neon’s driveway or a resident drunk in a sequined dress riding a lawnmower through the snow. But even though the book feels light, Luchette does not turn away from the responsibility of examining the darkness undergirding the institution of the Catholic Church.
A charming and incisive debut.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26526-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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