A dark novel marred by occasional melodrama but lightened by often hilarious dialogue.
The Irish writer’s 10th novel for adults examines one man’s life over the course of 70 years to reveal the personal and societal toll of Ireland’s repression of homosexuality.
It’s 1945, and a philandering Catholic priest is throwing 16-year-old Catherine Goggin out of church and the village for being unwed and pregnant as her family looks on silently. With quick strokes and bitter humor, Boyne’s (A History of Loneliness, 2015, etc.) opening scene encapsulates the Irish church’s hypocrisy and utter control of a meek flock. Having taken on the church’s sexual abuse of children in his previous novel, Boyne continues his crusading ways with the quiet keening of this painful, affecting novel. Catherine will travel to Dublin and give birth after saving the life of a gay youth whose partner is beaten to death by his own father. Her son, Cyril, the book’s first-person narrator, is adopted in infancy by a wealthy Dublin couple. He is smitten at 7 with a boy his age who visits the house, and even more so at 14, when they are roommates in school, but he mutes his passion for the handsome, charismatic Julian as they become close friends. As Boyne captures Cyril every seven years, his 20s feature a double life, secret promiscuity and public straightness. Then, he briefly marries (1973), flees Ireland, finds love in Amsterdam (1980), and works with AIDs patients in New York (1987). There, he suffers two wrenching losses—which also, happily, mark the end of Cyril’s tendency to forget he’s a witty, ironic conversationalist and veer close to maudlin self-pity. His later years in Ireland seem to bring the promise of reconciliation on several fronts, but there is still penance and pain until the book’s last word.
A dark novel marred by occasional melodrama but lightened by often hilarious dialogue.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6078-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An artfully crafted coming-of-age story that will take the reader on an exquisite olfactory adventure.
A young girl with a unique talent for identifying scents embarks on a journey of self-discovery when she's ripped from her intensely isolated childhood home.
Emmeline has lived with her father on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest for as long as she can remember. Her father teaches her to read, to forage for food, and to hone her sense of smell. Emmeline doesn’t question their isolation, as she’s known nothing else. She adores the long days learning from her father, listening to fairy tales, and watching him use his mysterious machine. The machine produces “scent-papers” that her father stashes inside small glass bottles, each paper preserving a one-of-a-kind scent. When tragedy strikes, Emmeline is forced to relocate to the mainland. She is taken in by a kind, childless couple in a seaside village. Similar to a wild animal suddenly brought into captivity, 12-year-old Emmeline struggles to adapt. As she slowly establishes a new life, beginning school and navigating adolescence, questions about her father, her absentee mother, and her own identity continue to grow. The more she learns about her past, the harder it becomes to reconcile her childhood with her future. Told entirely from Emmeline’s perspective, the novel contains three distinct sections. The first, where Emmeline is living in the wild, is suffused with wonder and enchantment. The author deftly describes the lush island and the awe of a little girl watching her father fill a cabin with mysterious bottles full of scents and dreams. Once Emmeline moves to the mainland, the patina of her youth wears off, and much of the magic of the story goes with it. Even so, the author’s ability to describe scents, the nature in which they evolve, and how deeply they are tied to memory and emotion provides sufficient heft to keep the novel engaging and worthwhile. Told in a lyrical, haunting prose, the story provides fascinating information about the ways in which different fragrances can impact human behavior and the struggles of finding one’s own identity.
An artfully crafted coming-of-age story that will take the reader on an exquisite olfactory adventure.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20013-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A quietly captivating debut.
A first-time novelist explores the curses and blessings of a childhood shaped by unreliable parents and an unforgiving sea.
This spiky, elliptical novel, which takes place on a fictional island off the coast of Southern California, begins with a beached whale. The inescapable odor and massive, macabre presence of the corpse are just two of the challenges Evangeline faces as she prepares for her wedding. Her long-absent mother has arrived uninvited. And it’s possible that the groom, a fisherman, has died at sea. While the whale is, in any practical sense, the least of Evie's worries, it feels horribly emblematic of her circumstances—maybe even of her whole existence. As she tells her story, moving back and forth in time, it becomes clear that Evie has a history of finding fixations to distract her from the most difficult aspects of her life. Ultimately, though, the subject she would like most to escape is the one she studies the most closely: her father. Evie’s dad is a beguiling figure, someone who provides for himself and his daughter as a raconteur and a drug dealer. When Evie’s a kid, his exceptional charm is just as crucial to their survival as his ability to score cocaine or produce epic weed. Sometimes they are the guests of wealthy friends who like to party. Sometimes they live in cheap apartments. Sometimes they are homeless. This instability makes Evie somewhat immune to her father’s charisma. As she grows up, we see how this colorful but volatile upbringing leaves her with real emotional deficits. Van Meter does not allow her narrator to luxuriate in self-pity, though. Some of the most heartbreaking moments in this novel are the most simply told, and there are scenes of beauty and magic and dry humor amid the chaos. And Evie is self-aware enough to acknowledge her own complexities and shortcomings.
A quietly captivating debut.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-859-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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