A sweet, albeit by-the-book, tale of human connection.
A sick young boy and an elderly man looking for something to live for form a deep bond in this debut novel.
Murray McBride is turning 100, but he’s in no celebratory mood. Still mourning the death of his beloved wife, Jenny, 18 months ago, Murray feels his life has run its course. He’s outlived not only his wife, but also his two sons, who died after long lives. His only remaining family, his grandson, Chance, seems to only be after his money. Murray’s Roman Catholic faith has been the main thing keeping him from suicide recently, but he resolves to make his 100th birthday the last day he takes the daily pill his lungs need to function, figuring such a death doesn’t really count. Vaguely hoping to comfort the ailing on his last full day, Murray wanders into a local heart ward and meets someone who changes his life: 10-year-old Jason Cashman, who desperately needs a transplant and must tote around an oxygen cart. After Jason leaves the hospital with his cold, money-driven father, Murray finds a list of the boy’s five wishes to be granted before he dies. Murray mourns lost time spent with his own sons due to his professional baseball career with the Chicago Cubs, and sees an opportunity to atone. With the assistance of Jason’s wise-beyond-her-years neighbor, Tiegan Rose Marie Atherton, Murray sets out to help the boy kiss a girl, hit a home run, and fulfill his dreams. Siple’s plot devices, messages, and character types will feel very familiar to fans of Hallmark movies and other inspirational tales, and these predictable beats mean his players sometimes feel more like moving cogs than fully complex human beings. But his story is still readable and well-told. Murray’s struggle to find meaning after outliving almost everyone in his life who mattered to him is one of the book’s most sensitively rendered elements. Jason’s reckoning with mortality provides some touching moments as well. But Siple struggles to capture the speech and mannerisms of a 10-year-old boy (Jason’s emails and ebullient statements are peppered with “Schweet!” and “Dude!”), which limits his impact as a character.
A sweet, albeit by-the-book, tale of human connection.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-040-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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