A story as observant and thoughtful as the lives of Irish monks; rewarding for contemplative readers.
Ridnouer’s debut novel relates the gentle spiritual journey undertaken by three American women living in Dublin.
The number three manifests throughout this tale of longing for meaning and love, and no more so than in the trinity of women examining their mundane lives in Ireland’s Fair City. Uprooted from the U.S. by their husbands, Jamie, Christy and Heather come together as hillwalking companions. They are drawn to Glendalough Valley in the Wicklow Mountains, where rises and vales of dewy green shelter ancient stone churches and holy wells—an apt backdrop to this meditative story. Each woman carries a burden of lost children or illness, and they wander unhappily through life until each finds a passion that transcends mere occupation. Heather becomes intrigued and artistically inspired by Saint Kevin, the founder of Glendalough’s monastic settlement; the 6th-century monk’s philosophies illuminate her own spiritual style, one in which Celtic paganism lies just beneath the surface. Christy, desperate for a baby, befriends a lonely girl in her apartment building, while Jamie, the skeptic, becomes captivated by the labyrinth at Glendalough and begins work on her own spiraling path. The women alternate between closeness with one another and their children and a growing distance from their unsympathetic husbands. But it’s not all reflection and insight: Heather and Jamie’s likable children are a nearly constant, squabbling and pouting presence. Ridnouer balances poetic descriptions with extremely casual, often pointed dialogue, peppered with words like “whatcha” and “didja.” She also does a fine job portraying the temporal, frequently amusing details of an expat American’s life in a city more than 1,000 years old. At heart, this novel is a spiritual quest, with portents, metaphor and prodigious symbolism. In time, each woman arrives at the end of her winding path changed in some quietly momentous way.
A story as observant and thoughtful as the lives of Irish monks; rewarding for contemplative readers.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463768270
Page Count: 251
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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