A quiet thriller that succeeds in mirroring life’s complex and jarring pathways.
In this debut novel, a teenage girl displays disturbing behavior while her frayed home life worsens.
The year is 1989, and 16-year-old Lucia Goldman lives with her mother, Valerie, in a shabby London apartment. Lucia has two older half-siblings from Valerie’s first marriage, Ben and Tim. The girl’s father, Colin, has grown emotionally distant since remarrying and retiring to Spain. Worst of all, Valerie drinks and frequently vents her frustration with life on her daughter, which leads to shouting matches and even physical violence. Lucia loathes her mother and uses pain, like radiator burns, to dull the present moment (“Pain pauses time”). Stress also causes a strange pulse to throb between her legs. One evening, Lucia is concentrating on homework when she discovers some water staining her paper. She can’t discern how it got there, but the notion of a leak in the apartment gives her mother hysterical flashbacks to a flood in 1979. The novelty of the situation energizes Lucia, and so she starts spilling water here and there in secret. When Ben becomes involved, he calls out Lucia for the mischief. But the situation becomes serious when a malicious force introduces itself as Ginger and warns Lucia: “Kill or I will.” Does this poltergeist have something to do with Colin’s disconnect from his daughter? In this charged, though delicately wrought period piece, Solomon flashes between 1989 and Lucia’s earlier years visiting her father. Sedate and eerie prose employs the senses fabulously, as in the line “She studies the patch of water. It looks like a goat’s head with horns from where she stands.” Certain details of Lucia’s childhood, including sharing a bed with her father, are odd at first. Later, Colin’s mental health deteriorates and creeping realizations hit Lucia and readers simultaneously. Throughout, seeing her suffer a traumatic adolescence is heartbreaking, and it is to the author’s credit that this narrative proceeds much like a memoir. A psychic investigator speaks to readers in their darkest moments when he tells Lucia: “Flow with life, my child, not against it.”
A quiet thriller that succeeds in mirroring life’s complex and jarring pathways.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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