Tackles a serious theme of forlornness with sincerity, buoyancy, and wit.
O’Connor’s debut is a coming-of-age tale of an Irish teen in 1996 who, on learning he’s adopted, plans to track down his birth parents.
Cork, Ireland, native Benjamin Hackett celebrates his 18th birthday with “a stack of pints at the local pub.” Awakening the next morning a year older and hung over, Ben returns home to a shock: his parents have decided to tell him he was adopted. He’s understandably upset and wants to find the parents he believes abandoned him and “punch them in their noses.” Enlisting his pal JJ for companionship and JJ’s Fiat 127, Ben heads to the Barnamire Convent in Cork, where he was born. Unfortunately, mere yards away from the convent, the two friends are mugged by a peculiar (but armed) fellow who insists they call him Apache. The nuns, meanwhile, are less than helpful in providing details on Ben’s adoption, and police show up to arrest Ben and JJ for trespassing. Getting the info on his birth parents expeditiously may require Ben to hobnob with criminal sorts and do a few things he’ll surely regret later. All for a potential reunion that shows no indication of being a happy one. O’Connor forgoes sentiment early on: Ben describes the unknown couple who birthed him as “rancid parents.” But what could have been a dark, dreary tale is sweetened by a surprising amount of humor. JJ, for one, offsets Ben’s ever-present ire with drollery; seeing a “Trespassers will die” sign, he notes, “That seems fairly unambiguous.” There are, however, more sober moments; Ben does favors in exchange for help—often something illicit that could put his life or others’ in peril. O’Connor’s lilting prose beautifies his tale, like a house that “looked nothing more than a teensy white dot high against the rocks with seagulls squabbling over which one of them was due a perch on her chimneypot.”
Tackles a serious theme of forlornness with sincerity, buoyancy, and wit.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-46-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A bloated, pointless-seeming prequel to 1985's bestselling Lonesome Dove. In his fourth book in three years, McMurtry (most recently, The Late Child, p. 417) introduces us to future heroes Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae—here, green Texas Rangers who've rashly signed on before age 20, seeking adventure in the wilds of western Texas. On their first mission, an ill-fated attempt to find a safe passage from San Antonio to El Paso, the two come face-to-face with Buffalo Hump, the fierce Comanche chief who almost single-handedly wipes out the whole Ranger troop. Adventure number two is equally doomed—an attempted assault on the far-away Mexican stronghold of Santa Fe. Before they even get to New Mexico, though, Call and Gus must endure the bleak elements, more of Buffalo Hump's abuse, the brutality of the Apaches, and finally the might of the well-trained Mexican Army. While the Rangers are being decimated, the reader is assured of the two heroes' survival. And since the rest of the Rangers are stock B-movie characters—the mournful black cook, the sullen mountain man, the prostitute with a heart of gold—there's little reason to be engaged by them. Overall, the novel's a series of mostly predictable encounters, with no underlying theme or emotional weight, whose best characters—English prisoners stuck in an El Paso leper colony—don't appear until the very end, and then only as an afterthought. In fact, the is seems so slipshoddily produced as to seem unedited, filled with continuity gaps and leaps of fictional faith, not to mention endless scenes, improbable dialogue, and countless leaden sentences: "Gus didn't seem to be particularly concerned about the prospect of Comanche capture—his nonchalant approach to life could be irksome in times of conflict." Only for blindly faithful McMurtry fans.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80753-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
Lightman, a teacher of physics and writing at MIT, evokes the musings of Albert Einstein in this playful, unusual first work of fiction. It is six in the morning, and a sleepy young Einstein slumps at his desk in the patent office, dreaming of the nature of time. Time has been on Einstein's mind a lot lately, and he's become adept at envisioning each of many theories in concrete, three- dimensional form. While Einstein sleeps, Lightman takes the reader through the young genius's imagined worlds, evoking cities in which time is cyclical and citizens are doomed to repeat their triumphs and mistakes eternally; in which people routinely get caught in wandering tributaries of time and are washed back into the past; in which time is believed to flow more slowly at higher altitudes so that all humans, in order to live longer, build their houses on mountaintops; in which there is no connection between cause and effect and people live a carefree existence in each separate moment, and in which it is possible to stop time and live forever within a favorite instant. Occasionally, Einstein wakes up, goes home, dines with a friend, or stares blankly off into the distance, but the focus here is not on his personal life. Instead, with these brief, light vignettes, Lightman offers a glimpse into strange theoretical kingdoms—and also lets the reader in on the workings of a creative scientific mind. Cheerful fantasies, balanced exquisitely between poetry and the popular physics essay. (First serial to Granta and Harper's.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41646-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
