A realistic, compassionate look at a family in crisis struggling toward individual growth and purpose.
A horse could be the salvation of a desperate man and his troubled son in this novel.
Body shop employee Dean Hostler’s impulse to buy a filly at a horse auction as a birthday gift for his 16-year-old son, Ricky, is one screw-up too many. His naïve winning bid of “16” means that he is contracted to pay $16,000 for the horse, not $1,600. His family’s trailer home is seized in lieu of payment, and his adored wife, Lorraine, leaves him. She loves the dreamer in Dean but not his disconnect from the reality of their lives—money worries and Ricky’s attention deficit disorder. That the horse, named Orphan, will be the catalyst to change the lives of Dean and Ricky is evident from the get-go. Dean is drawn to her as “something ancient and incorruptible,” and she becomes Ricky’s world. But this tale, set in the 1980s, is written with too much gritty compassion for its flawed characters to turn into a trite, upbeat horse story. Keegan, whose books include the YA novel Clearwater Summer (1994) and the adult novel A Good Divorce (2003), brings nuance to the emotionally charged challenges his players face as they strive to find themselves. Alternating third-person narratives reveal Dean’s and Lorraine’s perspectives of each other, Ricky, the painful family histories that shaped them, their differing hopes for the future, and her potentially devastating secret. These relatable narratives are effectively interspersed with Ricky’s troubled, first-person observations of his parents, the new people in their lives (including horsewoman Jill Sprague, who has her own demons but gives Dean and Orphan a safe harbor), and the teen’s condition. Ricky’s disorder worsens when his mother is courted by a manipulative man, Dean’s one-time best friend from high school. Movingly, Ricky’s condition is integral to the profound, healing bond that he forms with Orphan. Throughout, the vivid milieu of horses, riders, and the “backside” of racing, where Dean feels at home with an eclectic mix of “people like himself who didn’t fit in anywhere else,” is informed by the depth of Keegan’s firsthand experience.
A realistic, compassionate look at a family in crisis struggling toward individual growth and purpose.Pub Date: June 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63-901466-8
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Global Summit House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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