A busy narrative and supernatural elements somewhat distract from this tale’s powerful underlying message to break free from...
In this debut novel, a woman clings to life while learning her family’s legacy of witchcraft, infidelity, and secrets.
Ellie wakes up alone in a snowy field, disoriented but uninjured following a car accident. She wanders through the cold until she finds a small cabin and is welcomed inside by Grace, her dead great-grandmother. Grace was murdered by her husband in 1975 and has been waiting for Ellie and the opportunity to share a story. Though Ellie is not dead, it seems she has landed in the in-between. Grace spins the tale of her unhappy marriage and tragic demise, of the witches in their family and those who have suffered from curses and ill-intentioned magic. While Ellie struggles to make sense of her family’s unexpected past and the modern-day ramifications of these revelations, her husband, Joe McHugh, sits by her hospital bed wracked by guilt. He’s a drunk who has cheated on Ellie and denied her hopes for a baby. Joe promises to change but can only wait helplessly as his wife lies in a coma. Klinger-Krebs’ twisty narrative takes multiple paths, jumping between the past and present and the living and the dead. The author deftly shows that secrets have permeated generations of Ellie’s family, causing pain and unhappiness. Grace’s mother kept her witchcraft a secret and Grace hid both her heritage and later infidelity. Ellie’s mother and grandmother never spoke of magic. And Joe, who is keeping several secrets from his wife, let the silence fester and infect his marriage. Klinger-Krebs’ potent message that “when no one speaks about the past or the present…or even the truth…silence can become a room” is well-demonstrated through the unhappy marriages that populate the novel. There are a number of superb plotlines and intriguing characters, which make the addition of supernatural components an unnecessary diversion. The vivid story is at its best when it is grounded in the realities and messiness of living, the challenges inherent in relationships, and the difficulty of navigating daily disappointments.
A busy narrative and supernatural elements somewhat distract from this tale’s powerful underlying message to break free from the patterns of the past and embrace the future you desire.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-72577-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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