by Donna Morrissey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2006
Absorbing human drama, in Morrissey’s best yet.
A way of life is compromised and threatened, and life goes stubbornly on, in the Canadian author’s third novel, following Downhill Chance (2003).
Set in small villages along the Newfoundland fishing banks during the 1950s, it’s the story of two families whose meager fortunes wax and wane as the business of cod-fishing is shaped by depleted resources, restrictive government policies and new technologies that render old ways obsolete (e.g., “Freezing fish is a better way of keeping them than salting. Bigger boats is a better way of catching them”). Morrissey dramatizes such changes in the experiences of the eponymous Sylvanus, hardy youngest son of a clan whose father and eldest son perished at sea, and headstrong Adelaide, the first-born in a sprawling crowd of siblings, whom their perpetually pregnant mother Florry has appointed “Addie” to care for. Dreaming of a fuller life, Addie marries doggedly devoted Sylvanus, who builds her a house, works tirelessly for her and gives her three babies, all stillborn, and buried in modest graves that the embittered Addie cannot bring herself to visit. Years pass; the families of Ragged Rock (Addie’s hometown) and Cooney Arm (where the Nows reside) struggle to survive, avoid the threat of government “resettlement” and adjust to the lingering burdens of their memories and their ghosts. And Morrissey’s people—stoical Sylvanus and resilient Addie (whose intimate moments and violent arguments alike throb with painful credibility), their hardbitten and longsuffering parents and relations—assume a near-mythic intensity reminiscent of Halldór Laxness’s epic portrayals of indomitable working souls. No conventional happy ending is possible, but reconciliation and acceptance are achieved, in a moving dénouement that proves the truth of Florry’s weary pronouncement, “If it weren’t for keeping things simple, nothing would ever get done.”
Absorbing human drama, in Morrissey’s best yet.Pub Date: April 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-32869-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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by Janice Hadlow ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Natalie Haynes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2018
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.
Two women, two Greek tragedies, one modern revamping.
British classicist Haynes writes a rejoinder—in fiction—to the near muteness of women in ancient Western texts. As she did with her psychological thriller, The Furies (2014), Haynes dives straight for Sophocles’ monumental plays. This time, she puts a mother and daughter on center stage instead of Sophocles’ title characters in Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Each woman has “the sense that someone was nearby, wishing her ill.” For Queen Jocasta of Thebes, it is the housekeeper Teresa, whose wickedness puts Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca to shame. For Jocasta’s youngest child, Ismene, the menace arrives in the first chapter. An orphan from age 5, the bookish 15-year-old leaves her reading nook only to be knifed by a stranger in the assumed safety of the palace. This thwarted political assassination dissolves into Chapter 2, which introduces Jocasta at the same age, bundled off a generation earlier to wed Thebes’ fossilized King Laius. This complex opening structure settles into chapters that alternate between the two women. The device works well, building tension as mother and daughter both struggle with confinement, treachery, politics, and hair. (Some verities apparently hold for 2.5 millennia.) After Laius dies, Jocasta becomes notorious—and thanks to Sophocles, immortal—for unwittingly marrying her son, Oedipus. This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men. But unlike the classically inspired novels of Madeline Miller or Colm Tóibín, antiquity bogs down in Haynes’ expository prose. And while the author adds an intriguing new character, the physician Sophon who is instrumental to both mother and daughter, the women themselves remain too flat on the page.
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-480-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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