by Karl Geary ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 2017
A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing—and transgressing—border walls...
The debut novel from screenwriter and actor Geary, set a generation ago in Dublin, depicts a dark, sad, doomed, and deeply unconventional love affair.
Sonny Knolls is a working-class teenager who earns extra money as a dogsbody at a butcher's shop after school and on the weekend helps his father, a small-time handyman. On one such occasion, as father and son shore up a homeowner's wall in the tony area that gives the novel its title, Sonny encounters their employer, a middle-aged woman named Vera whose haunted, ethereal beauty—partly bound up in her seeming an alien from the far-off land of Posh and Prosperous—makes an immediate and indelible impression. Sonny begins to contrive ways to see her again, reasons to return to her trim and lovely house. His own neighborhood is grimy, his family life bleakly unpromising; Sonny's father is a crank and a gambler, his mother meek, resentful, but long-suffering; it's the sort of family in which communication, if one has to indulge in such, is guilt-ridden, stunted, laconic, furtive. Geary skillfully captures the milieu and establishes Sonny's hapless sense of where he's headed: blackout drinking, petty theft, expulsion from school, a meat-cutting apprenticeship he'll be lucky to keep, a life of grim hanging on. Vera, who has formidable troubles of her own with depression, is likewise drawn (there are hints of a precipitating mystery and shame here, but there’s no way to put it together until the end) to the sensitive, vulnerable, good-looking teenager, and before long the tension between them explodes into an erotic clinch that, she tells him, he'll eventually hate her for. That Geary makes this romantic relationship feel genuine and even touching, as well as unsettling and a little creepy, is one of the book's several merits.
A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing—and transgressing—border walls of various kinds.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-55-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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by Karl Geary
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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