A readable and involving tale about several characters finding new directions in life.
The lives of a handful of strangers intertwine in this novel of forgiveness and renewal.
Moore organizes her book into several parallel narrative strands, each revolving around one of her small group of central characters. First, readers meet Merisela when she’s a teenager working at the Taco Snack Shop in the Mexican village of Playa Orma, “a beach resort glued onto a poverty-stricken fishing village,” and being sexually abused by her stepfather, Jose. Readers also encounter Mike Edgerton, who shows some promise as a baseball pitcher in school despite his impoverished background (“I didn’t think they’d let kids from that development play in the league,” he overhears somebody say. “I’ve heard the place is crawling with drugs”). But Mike is shortly in jail on manslaughter charges; there, he meets good-hearted social worker Keaton Thomas. The book’s most involving character is Maria Rojas, who gives up a thriving dental practice in Mexico to immigrate to Toronto with her husband, Eduardo. But he abruptly leaves her and their four children for another woman, forcing Maria to register for welfare. In alternating chapters, Moore follows these characters and others as they navigate small triumphs and one series of setbacks after another, each segment told with an appealing reserve and a good ear for dialogue. While her players often suffer life-changing difficulties, the author never descends into bathos, and the result is that their struggles seem all the more believable for being underdramatized. The eventual plot resolutions, including the central and glowingly optimistic one, are effectively rendered. Issues like immigration, domestic abuse, and inequality percolate beneath the surface of these separate stories, but the overall narrative is dominated by themes of endurance and redemption (foreshadowed in the book title’s reference to the Gospel of St. Matthew’s call for forgiveness). These themes feel very real when embodied by these well-realized characters—who become even more intriguing as they begin interacting with one another.
A readable and involving tale about several characters finding new directions in life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-8410-7
Page Count: 306
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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