An often entertaining, if unevenly executed, tale of the extraordinary lengths that people can go in pursuit of their dreams.
In Hagemann’s novel, a feckless young couple trust in supernatural powers to save their dream home from demolition in a small town in Western Australia.
May and Isaac Lyons have just bought a dilapidated former Girl Guide Hall in the idyllic country town of Farmbridge, hoping to renovate it into a combined home, dress shop, and painting studio without obtaining the necessary construction permits to do so. It turns out that the hall is haunted by the ghost of a murdered teenage goth girl who had a creepy obsession with the occult and who now moves objects around at night. It’s also threatened with imminent demolition by the government’s Asbestos Task Force, known as the “Grey Shirts,” even though the couple firmly believes that the building doesn’t contain any asbestos. Practical May sells her handmade fashion creations online and finds solace in nature; however, spontaneous, childlike painter Isaac is in debt to a violent drug dealer. On the first day of his dismal new day job at a bauxite refinery, he befriends a young Indigenous man named Steve,whose grandfather Kal is a respected elder; together, they hatch a scheme to scare off both the dealer and the A.T.F. The author packs a lot of ideas and action into fewer than 200 pages in this debut novel, and the juxtaposition of realistic and supernatural elements is intriguing and unsettling, by turns. However, although the characters are original and well-drawn, their actions don’t always make sense; May and Isaac are surprisingly manipulative and secretive toward each other for a couple that’s also shown to be so passionately in love, for example. Hagemann’s prose can be lyrical and evocative, as in detailed descriptions of the town’s river and its wildlife. Other times, though, it can be awkward: “Joe had a stout body, a fat stomach including his neck.”
An often entertaining, if unevenly executed, tale of the extraordinary lengths that people can go in pursuit of their dreams.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-95-257030-8
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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